The US government is prosecuting only about one out of four of those charged in connection with terrorism, said a study that suggests federal agencies don’t agree on who is a terrorist.
People charged with terrorism often go free because the evidence wasn’t strong enough to bring them to trial, says the study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data research group at Syracuse University.
Since 2002, the percentage of terrorism cases that federal prosecutors declined to pursue has grown from 31 percent to 73 percent, the TRAC study found.
Nearly 6,000 of the close to 8,900 cases referred for prosecution by federal investigators between 2004 and last year were closed without action. Of the remaining cases, 2,302 people were convicted and 1,245 went to prison, the study found, and just 52 were sentenced to 20 years or more.
The data showed US attorneys reported that the cases brought to them by investigators were often based on weak or insufficient admissible evidence, lacked criminal intent or did not constitute a federal offense.
The Justice Department disagrees with TRAC’s analysis and conclusions and says the data omits some statistics and uses data that differs from the agency’s information.
“In the eight years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department has significantly improved its ability to identify, penetrate and dismantle terrorist plots,” spokesman Dean Boyd said.
Terror charges can range from dramatic bombing plots to immigration violations or certain instances of financial fraud and identity theft.
Scores of organizations across the federal government — the FBI, IRS, Secret Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives just to name a few — enforce laws that can be associated with terrorism. Federal prosecutors determine which cases will be brought to court.
The prosecutions are tracked by three different groups: the federal courts through the Administrative Office of the United States Courts; the National Security Division of the Justice Department; and the Executive Office for US Attorneys, which is also part of the Justice Department and includes the offices of the 94 US attorneys in the US and its territories.
All three have varying ways of identifying terror-related crimes, and TRAC found that about one-third of the defendants charged in federal court with a terrorism offense were not categorized as having a connection to terrorism.
The findings led TRAC to conclude that the government must better define and focus its terrorism enforcement.
“The government seems to be unable to make up its mind what is a terrorist,” said David Burnham, an author of the TRAC study. “We think the data suggests that they’re targeting the wrong subjects in a big way.”
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS