Feds ask court to uphold Coast Guard o cer’s sentence
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Justice Department prosecutors have urged a federal appeals court to uphold a prison sentence of more than 13 years for a former Coast Guard officer accused of plotting a terrorist attack inspired by infamous mass murderers and far-right extremists.
The arguments from federal prosecutors in Maryland came in a court filing Friday, about three months after attorneys for Christopher Hasson asked the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to let him withdraw his guilty plea or else throw out his sentence. The main area of contention in the appeal case is whether a federal judge in Maryland properly applied a terrorism enhancement to the sentence of the former lieutenant, who was not charged or convicted of a terrorism-related offense.
Hasson’s attorney in the appeal argued that the defendant’s 160-month prison term was roughly four times longer than sentencing guidelines would have called for if U.S. District Judge George Hazel had not mistakenly applied the terrorism enhancement to the sentence. Federal prosecutors on Friday countered that Hazel properly applied the enhancement.
Prosecutors wrote that by the “plain wording” of the sentencing guidelines, “there is no requirement that the defendant have committed a federal crime of terrorism. All that is required is that the o ense involved or was intended to promote a federal crime of terrorism.”
Hasson, 51, pleaded guilty in October to possessing unregistered and unserialized silencers, being a drug addict in possession of firearms and illegal possession of tramadol, an opioid painkiller. He is serving his sentence at a medium-security federal correctional facility in North Carolina.