Over at National Security Advisors (the new blog that Steve, Tung, and I recently launched) I’ve posted some disposition and sentencing data that I gathered recently with respect to cases in which the government prosecutes a person for providing “material support or resources” to a designated foreign terrorist organization (in violation of 18 USC 2339B) or for providing services to any foreign entity that has, in effect, been embargoed pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (under 50 USC 1705). The punchline is that the government has obtained convictions in a substantial number of these cases, and that the typical sentence is about 10 years’ imprisonment. I’m not sure precisely what conclusions should be drawn from this, if any, though I do think that it should be considered in connection with discussions of the recent report by the Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse (which examines a much broader data set that results in the appearance of very brief sentences in terrorism cases).
Posted by Bobby Chesney on September 10, 2006 at 05:08 PM