Federal Judiciary

Hamdan sentenced to 5 1/2 years

By Akin Gump Supreme Court Practice Group

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the Yemeni national convicted on Wednesday by a military commission on charges of providing support to terrorism, was sentenced by the same jury on Thursday to 66 months in a detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, according to news accounts.

Here is the initial report from the Miami Herald.  The story notes that the military judge had decided to credit Hamdan with about five years of time he had been at Guantanamo, thus apparently limiting his detention based on the sentence to perhaps five months.  The conviction and sentence are subject to review on appeal in military and civilian courts.

Hamdan, however, has been designated an “enemy combatant” by the Pentagon, and as long as that remains in effect, he would stay confined at Guantanamo, though not in the separate facility set aside for those convicted of war crimes by commissions.  He is challenging his detention and continued imprisonment in a habeas case in U.S. District Court (04-1519); the case has been temporarily assigned, for coordination with other habeas cases, to Senior Judge Thomas F. Hogan.  Otherwise, it remains pending before District Judge James Robertson.

Full post as published by SCOTUSBLOG on August 07, 2008 (boomark / email).