WASHINGTON — Jose Padilla, who was detained as an enemy combatant for 31/2 years for allegedly plotting to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb,” was sentenced Tuesday to just over 17 years in prison on separate terrorism-related charges in Miami.
The Justice Department had urged U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke to sentence Padilla to life in prison for being part of an extremist cell that gave support to al-Qaida and other Islamic militant groups.
The sentence means that Padilla, now 37, could walk free when he is in his early 50s.
Cooke also handed down prison terms of more than 15 years to Adham Amin Hassoun, 45, who recruited Padilla, and more than 12 years to Kifah Wael Jayyousi, 46, who was a financier for the cell.
The three men were convicted in August of terrorism conspiracy and material support charges for lending aid to Islamic militants in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia and other countries.
In sentencing Padilla and the two co-defendants, Cooke deemed the terms set in federal sentencing guidelines of 30 years to life disproportionately severe to their crimes. She cited the life terms meted out to Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols and to would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui in rejecting the same for Padilla, pointing out that there were neither victims of his crimes nor any damage done to U.S. security or interests.
The judge ruled that since Padilla had been held in solitary confinement without legal representation or so much as a mattress, his treatment warranted a reduced sentence. She took off the 42 months he spent in the brig from the original 250-month sentence she had calculated, leaving him with 17 years and four months before the Bureau of Prisons subtracts time served and consideration for good behavior.
Padilla’s mother celebrated the unexpectedly lenient sentence, proclaiming “Hallelujah!” outside the courthouse and saying it proved her son wasn’t the dangerous terrorist alleged by the government.
“What they said about Jose Padilla — this proves he’s not a terrorist. He’s not an enemy combatant. He’s not al-Qaida or Taliban. He’s just a human being, and an American citizen,” Estela Ortega-Lebron said.
Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested returning to the United States in 2002 and was soon designated an enemy combatant by President Bush. The case was announced at the time with great fanfare by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and other Bush administration officials, who portrayed Padilla as a dangerous and high-ranking al-Qaida operative who was working on a plot to detonate a “dirty bomb” inside the United States. He was never charged in connection with those accusations.
Authorities later alleged that Padilla traveled extensively around the Middle East from 2000 to 2002, attended the terrorist training camp, met with senior al-Qaida leaders and planned to blow up U.S. apartment buildings with natural gas. Justice officials said many of the allegations stemmed from admissions by Padilla.
But the Miami court case did not include any mention of these alleged plots, largely because much of the evidence had been obtained through interrogations of Padilla, Sept. 11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other al-Qaida prisoners that would not be admissible in regular criminal courts.
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