Three men convicted in 2011 of planning terrorist attacks in New York are to be freed early from prison by the same judge who handed down their initial sentences after she castigated the FBI for unfairly setting them up in a sting operation.
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon granted each compassionate release, reducing their mandatory 25-year minimum sentences to time served plus 90 days, per the Associated Press.
The three men — Onta Williams, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen — along with a fourth named James Cromitie, who did not file a compassionate release request, were known as the “Newburgh Four.” The Newburgh Four were arrested in 2009 following an FBI sting operation for what the authorities called a “chilling plot” spurred by a Pakistani terrorist group, reported the AP.
Allegedly, the men planned to shoot down planes at the Air National Guard base in Newburgh, New York, and to blow up synagogues in Riverdale.
At trial, the prosecution alleged that the men had spent months planning the attacks, which they claimed were masterminded by Cromitie. The prosecution did not make the international terrorist organization ties a part of the case, per the AP.
The men’s lawyers claimed that their clients had been victims of government entrapment. According to the defense, Shaheed Hussain, the federal informant in the case, had used persuasion and money to entice the four to get involved in a plot of the government’s devising that they otherwise would not have engaged in.
The four men were former convicts, a fact that their relatives claimed made them poor, desperate, and easily influenced.
McMahon was scathing in her critique of the FBI, echoing the defense’s argument at the time of trial. The order described Cromitie as an insignificant “grifter and petty drug dealer” who was destitute and unemployed, which made him an easy mark for an FBI-driven plot to execute a “jihadist ‘mission’” in exchange for $250,000.
“Nothing about the crimes of conviction was the defendants’ own doing. The FBI invented the conspiracy,” McMahon wrote about the plot that relied on fake bombs the FBI provided.
Though McMahon said it was “heinous” of the defendants to have had a role in the authorities’ “made for tv movie,” “the sentence was the product of a fictitious plot to do things that these men had never remotely contemplated, and that were never going to happen.”
“We are tremendously pleased that our clients are on their way home — even if it’s fourteen years too late,” said Amith R. Gupta, part of the team of lawyers representing the soon-to-be-freed men, according to the AP.
Kerry Lawrence, the lawyer for Cromitie, whose sentence will be completed in 2030, plans to confer with his client about petitioning the court for an early release as well.
“I’m confident he would be entitled to relief for the same reasons articulated by Judge McMahon for the other defendants,” Lawrence said, per the AP.
When McMahon initially handed down the sentences in 2011, she was also critical of the government for its role in instigating the crime, as reported at the time by the New York Daily News.
Contrasting the case with other domestic terror cases, McMahon said, “The government did not have to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot — there was no nefarious plot to foil.”
The Dallas Express reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York for comment on the judge’s order but did not receive an immediate reply.
