Port Angeles, Wash.-Many in this port town welcome the Feb. 2 ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that procedures resulting in a lenient 22-year sentence for fertilizer bomber Ahmed Ressam were in error and that the case should be sent back to a new judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington for a new sentencing hearing. Typical of the response was that of one of the customs inspectors on duty when 41-year-old Algerian-born Ressam was captured here 10 years ago. The inspector told the local press, “My first thought was what it has always been, that he got 22 years for what he was planning to do, and that was just obscene.” The court in San Francisco also removed U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour of Seattle from the case, saying he committed key procedural errors at Ressam’s sentencing hearing and that Coughenour’s “previously expressed views appear too entrenched to allow for the appearance of fairness.” A new judge will be assigned to the case within three weeks, said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington. Ressam was sentenced Dec. 3, 2008, for his failed plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in 1999. At that hearing, prosecutors sought a sentence of life in prison after Ressam told the court that the information he had provided to the government to shorten his sentence was the product of an unstable mind. He was arrested Dec. 14, 1999, as he tried to enter the U.S. at Port Angeles with explosive ingredients in the trunk of his rental car. Later, customs inspectors searched the trunk and discovered 118 pounds of urea fertilizer, sulfate powder, four timing devices, and pill bottles of explosive materials. One of the bottles contained an oily liquid more volatile than nitroglycerin.
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