Jose Padilla is no saint, but he also is not a terrorist. His mother, Estela Ortega Lebron has said so ever since he was arrested in 2002, and now a federal district court judge in Miami agrees with her.
The so-called Puerto Rican Taliban was sentenced to 17 years and four months in jail -- far short of the 30 years to life that federal prosecutors were pursuing. The sentence is a blow to the U.S. government and calls into question whether it overstepped its boundaries by disregarding the constitutional rights of an American citizen in its efforts to make some points in its war against terror.
When Padilla was detained in May 2002 at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a major coup: A man had been arrested who was conspiring to make a radioactive “dirty bomb” that would be detonated in a large American city with the intention of causing “mass death and injury.”
A former gang member with a long criminal record, Padilla -- also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir or Muhajir Abdullah -- was labeled an “enemy combatant,” locked up in a military prison in South Carolina and treated like just one more of the hundreds of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. No official charges were filed against him. He was kept in isolation, unable to have visitors or access to legal representation.
Under the circumstances, the federal government argued that it had the right to hold a terror suspect under these conditions and have him face a military tribunal instead of the civilian court system. But Padilla was not a radical fundamentalist from Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, like many of the Guantanamo detainees, but rather an American citizen who had traveled to those countries.
In a rare interview a year ago, Lebron claimed that her son, who was raised Catholic and converted to Islam, traveled to the Middle East to further study his new religion, not to be part of a terrorist group. Prosecutors claimed he actually went to the region with the intention of joining an al-Qaida training camp.
After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle, the government was forced to give up its fight to treat Padilla as an enemy combatant and transfer him to a Miami jail, where he would face trial in a civilian court with two other co-defendants. There, his mother was finally able to visit him, and she announced that her son was being tortured and was continuing to be treated like a terrorist.
This time the charges against the three men had nothing to do with a dirty bomb, but rather conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas. After a three-month trial, a federal jury found the three men guilty of all charges.
While emphasizing the seriousness of the crimes, Miami District Court Judge Marcia Cooke noted that there was no evidence that Padilla and his co-defendants were part of a plot to overthrow the United Status. “There is no evidence that these defendants personally maimed, kidnapped or killed anyone in the United States or elsewhere,” she said.
Judge Cooke said it was people like Zacarias Moussaoui -- who pleaded guilty to charges that he was to be part of the Sept. 11 al-Qaida suicide bombers -- and Terry Nichols -- who was convicted for the attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City -- who deserve life behind bars. In her decision, she took into account the three and a half years Padilla spent in a military jail and what she described as “the harsh treatment he received during his detention.”
The sentence has gotten mixed reactions, with both the federal government and defense lawyers vowing to appeal. Civil-rights activists complained that the way the case was handled did not make America safer, but rather less free. But for Estela Ortega Lebron, it was enough to claim victory. “I am very happy,” she said. “Now it’s been confirmed that my son is not a terrorist.”
Among other lessons, Judge Cooke’s sentence sends the message that a suspect should be held accountable for the harm he or she could potentially cause, but not for hypothetical crimes that have not been committed.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER’S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www
.mariaesalinas.com)
© 2008 by Maria Elena Salinas