Supreme Court taking up bomber case

SEATTLE – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider reinstating part of the conviction of would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam, a case the government says will greatly affect terrorism prosecutions.

Ressam, an Algerian national, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2005 after being convicted on nine counts for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport around Jan. 1, 2000. Customs agents in Port Angeles caught him with explosives in the trunk of his rental car when he drove off a ferry from British Columbia in December 1999. The ensuing scare prompted the cancellation of New Year’s celebrations at Seattle’s Space Needle.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out one count, in which Ressam was convicted of carrying explosives during the commission of another serious crime.

The appeals court – relying on a 1985 opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy when he was a 9th Circuit judge – said the law required prosecutors to show the explosives were not simply carried at the same time another felony was committed, but that the explosives possession was “in relation to” the felony.

In Ressam’s case, the underlying crime was lying on a customs form.

The government argued that other appeals courts have determined that “nothing in the provision says the explosives must have been carried ‘in relation to’ the underlying felony,” and that because the crime carries a minimum 10-year sentence, it’s an important tool for putting away terrorists who are caught before they use explosives they’ve acquired.

If the Supreme Court reinstates the conviction, the case will be returned to the 9th Circuit to hear the government’s arguments that the 22-year sentence was unreasonably low, considering the damage Ressam intended to inflict. If the Supreme Court upholds the lower court’s decision, the case will be returned to U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle for new sentencing proceedings, based on Ressam’s conviction on the other eight counts.

“I am very pleased, and the office is very pleased that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this appeal,” said Jeff Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in Seattle. “We believe the sentence Mr. Ressam received was too low.”

Sullivan said he wasn’t worried about Kennedy having penned the 9th Circuit precedent. The government believes that case is distinguishable from Ressam’s, and Kennedy has since written another opinion concerning interpretation of congressional intent, which is at the heart of the dispute in Ressam’s case, Sullivan said.

“We have a fair shot of getting this case decided in our favor,” he said.

Ressam’s lead attorney, Thomas Hillier, the federal public defender in Seattle, said Friday that he did not believe allowing the 9th Circuit’s decision to stand would make it tougher for the government to win long sentences in terrorism cases.

The explosives-carrying law has been used in six other terrorism-related cases around the country, he said, and in each case the government was able to show that explosives were carried in furtherance of the underlying crime. In Ressam’s case, the prosecutors made a mistake, he said: If they had charged that Ressam carried the explosives while committing Count 1, a terrorism offense, they would have won. Instead, they charged that Ressam carried the explosives while providing false information on a Customs form, an unrelated offense, he said.

In a brief, the defense team also noted that Ressam’s 22-year sentence was calculated independently of the guideline sentencing range as a way to take his post-trial cooperation into account. Therefore, whether Ressam was convicted on the explosives-carrying charge had no bearing on his ultimate sentence, making the discussion about the 9th Circuit’s decision purely academic.

“I’m anxious for the case to be finished,” Hillier said. “He has to go back to be resentenced one way or another, and the uncertainty over what the final sentence is going to be is difficult for Ahmed.”