Padilla, allies seek leniency

MIAMI —  Defense lawyers argued Wednesday that Jose Padilla and two co-defendants convicted of terrorism were bit players at best in the global holy war led by Osama bin Laden, and that their sentences should reflect their low-level status.

Prosecutors, who portrayed the three men as ideological allies of terrorist kingpins during a four-month trial last year, say the defendants deserve life sentences because they played “leadership roles” among a handful of operatives in a South Florida terrorist cell.

“The government can’t have it both ways,” Padilla attorney Michael Caruso told U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke. At trial the government had cast the defendants as small fish in a global Al Qaeda pond, he argued, yet for sentencing purposes it sought to cast them as big fish in a local pond.

Cooke will decide prison terms for Padilla, his alleged recruiter Adham Amin Hassoun and the former head of U.S.-based Muslim relief agencies, Kifah Wael Jayyousi.

In August, a jury convicted all three on charges of conspiracy to murder, maim or kidnap people abroad and of material support for terrorism. Assistant U.S. attorneys have asked Cooke to apply the maximum term, life in prison, for all three men.

Although prosecutors say the three funneled fighters and aid to Islamic militants around the world, “the charged conspiracy is exceedingly broad,” Caruso said of the links to Al Qaeda alleged by the government. “You have to concede that Mr. Padilla played a minimal role.”

Defense lawyers contend that the men were simply responding to their religious duty to defend Muslims under assault in ethnic conflicts in places like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia’s Kosovo province, Russia’s Chechnya republic and Somalia.

Padilla’s legal team has urged the judge to impose no more than a 10-year sentence, in light of his harsh treatment during the 3 1/2 years he spent in solitary confinement at a military brig in South Carolina.

Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in May 2002 on a material witness warrant and later accused by then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft of plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in an unspecified U.S. city.

During his time in the brig, interrogators employed sensory deprivation and other tactics in an effort to extract confessions -- measures that Padilla’s attorneys contend amounted to torture.

The Pentagon eventually abandoned the dirty-bomb allegations and Padilla was transferred to the federal court system in November 2005, when the Supreme Court was expected soon to rule that the Pentagon had no right to hold a U.S. citizen as an “enemy combatant.”

Attorneys for Hassoun, a religious activist who met Padilla at a mosque near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., shortly after Padilla converted to Islam and moved to South Florida, have lobbied Cooke for a sentence of no more than four to six years.

Jayyousi, who ran a Muslim aid group from San Diego in the early 1990s, should get probation or no more than 21 months, his lawyers argued in petitions to the court.

Federal sentencing guidelines in terrorism cases require Cooke to determine whether additional prison time should be meted out for any leadership role or if a “terrorism enhancement” multiplier is applicable.

The government has taken a hard line against the convicts, insisting they deserve no leniency and pose grave dangers.

Padilla “stands before this court as a trained Al Qaeda killer,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Russell Killinger. The government maintains that Padilla trained to become a holy warrior at a camp in Afghanistan.

“Mr. Padilla willfully, intentionally and knowingly supplied himself to Al Qaeda,” Killinger said.

The first two days of the sentencing hearing, expected to run through the middle of next week, were taken up with more than 90 objections from defense lawyers to a pre-sentencing report prepared by the court’s probation officer.

The report is based heavily, if not exclusively, on prosecution accounts of the evidence presented at trial. Included in the confidential document was reference to a videotape of a 1997 CNN interview with Bin Laden that Cooke allowed the jury to see after the government argued that it related to the defendants’ state of mind.

None of the men was alleged to ever have met Bin Laden or any other Al Qaeda figure, and defense lawyers said the video was inflammatory.

William Swor, Jayyousi’s lawyer, urged Cooke to strike the CNN interview from the report, which will be passed on to the Bureau of Prisons for guidance in determining the conditions of each man’s incarceration. He branded the report a misrepresentation of the evidence introduced at trial.

“If you tie these guys to Osama bin Laden in this report, they’re all going to ADX,” Swor warned Cooke, referring to the government’s administrative detention extreme -- the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., designed for the nation’s most violent and dangerous inmates.

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carol.williams@latimes.com