US court rules Padilla terror sentence too short
He should get a life sentence IMO.
MIAMI — Jose Padilla, the US citizen arrested in 2002 for an alleged “dirty bomb” plot, got off too lightly when he was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.
The three judge panel tossed out Padilla’s sentence and ordered a new hearing to determine a more appropriate punishment for his crimes.
“The district court attached little weight to Padilla’s extensive criminal history, gave no weight to his future dangerousness, compared him to criminals who were not similarly situated, and gave unreasonable weight to the conditions of his pre-trial confinement,” chief judge Joel Dubina wrote in the 2-1 opinion.
Padilla, 40, dubbed the “Puerto Rican Taliban,” was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport after returning from Egypt and was taken to a US navy prison in South Carolina.
US authorities justified his detention without charge saying he was an “enemy combatant” who allegedly planned to explode a radioactive bomb in the country.
But when he was transferred to the civilian justice system after three-and-a-half years in military detention, the indictment made no mention of the so-called “dirty bomb” plot.The former Chicago gang member and Muslim convert was instead convicted of aiding a US-based Al-Qaeda cell that supplied recruits and funding to Islamic extremists abroad, and conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim people in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and other countries from 1993 to 2001.