WASHINGTON — A new study of Justice Department terrorism prosecutions since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks shows that while the government has convicted 184 people of crimes deemed to be "international terrorism," defendants were sentenced to a median prison term of just 14 days -- and in some cases received no jail time at all.
This is among the conclusions of a study, released Sunday, by researchers at Syracuse University who examined government terrorism prosecution data.
In its two-year war on terrorism, the Justice Department has trumpeted a number of high-profile convictions and lengthy prison terms won against alleged terrorist sympathizers and supporters in federal courtrooms.
But the study found that, in the most serious cases, sentences are actually shorter. The number of defendants sentenced to five years or more for terrorism-related crimes declined in the two years after the attacks compared with the two years before them, the authors found.
"It raises questions about how the government is targeting its investigative work in this area," said David Burnham, a former newspaper reporter who works with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the data-gathering firm affiliated with Syracuse that conducted the study.
"Clearly, terrorism enforcement is a very serious business. There are people in the world who really want to do us harm," he said. "It is also essential that the government work as smartly and as effectively as possible."
In a statement, an FBI spokeswoman, Cassandra Chandler, called the report "misleading," saying it ignored the fact that a growing number of referrals to prosecutors relate to intelligence gathered about terrorist threats, which are not necessarily likely to result in immediate prosecution.
The conclusions reflect how the Justice Department, under Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, has adopted an aggressive and expansive view of what constitutes potential terrorist activity in the aftermath of the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks.
Over the last two years, for instance, the government has begun to include in anti-terrorism data hundreds of immigration cases, where offenders often end up receiving probation or sentences that amount to only the time they were incarcerated awaiting a hearing or trial.
