Another FIRST STEP Act sentence reduction for last of “Newburgh Four” defendants involved in “FBI-orchestrated conspiracy”
In this post six months ago, I flagged US District Judge Colleen McMahon’s notable opinion in US v. Williams, in which she explained why she was reducing the sentences of three of the “Newburgh Four” defendants using her authority under the FIRST STEP Act’s revisions to 18 USC § 3582(c)(1)(A). The other shoe dropped late last week in this matter, as reported in this AP piece headlined “Judge orders release of ‘Newburgh Four’ defendant and blasts FBI’s role in terror sting.” Here are excerpts from the press account:
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon on Friday granted James Cromitie, 58, compassionate release from prison six months after she ordered the release of his three co-defendants, known as the Newburgh Four, for similar reasons. The four men from the small river city 60 miles (97 kilometers) north of New York City were convicted of terrorism charges in 2010.
Cromitie has served 15 years of his 25-year minimum sentence. The New York-based judge ordered Cromitie’s sentence to be reduced to time served plus 90 days.
Prosecutors in the high-profile case said the Newburgh defendants spent months scouting targets and securing what they thought were explosives and a surface-to-air missile, aiming to shoot down planes at the Air National Guard base in Newburgh and blow up synagogues in the Bronx. They were arrested after allegedly planting “bombs” that were packed with inert explosives supplied by the FBI.
Critics have accused federal agents of entrapping a group of men who were down on their luck after doing prison time.
In a scathing ruling, McMahon wrote that the FBI invented the conspiracy and identified the targets. Cromitie and his co-defendants, she wrote, “would not have, and could not have, devised on their own a crime involving missiles that would have warranted the 25-year sentence the court was forced to impose.” “The notion that Cromitie was selected as a ‘leader’ by the co-defendants is inconceivable, given his well-documented buffoonery and ineptitude,” she wrote.
Cromitie was bought into the phony plot by the federal informant Shaheed Hussain, whose work has been criticized for years by civil liberties groups. McMahon called him “most unsavory” and a “villain” sent by the government to “troll among the poorest and weakest of men for ‘terrorists’ who might prove susceptible to an offer of much-needed cash in exchange for committing a faux crime.”
Judge McMahon’s full opinion in US v. Cromitie, 09 CR 558-01 (CM) (SDNY Jan. 19, 2024), is available at this link. Here is just one notable passage in an opinion filled with notable passages:
Nothing could be more certain than the fact that Cromitie and his codefendants would not have, and could not have, devised on their own a crime involving missiles that would have warranted the 25-year sentence the court was forced to impose. See United States v. Cromitie, 727 F.3d 194 (2d Cir. 2013). Then Chief Judge Jacobs, who would have overturned Cromitie’s (and only Cromitie’s) conviction on entrapment grounds, said it best: “It is clear that Cromitie in his unmolested state of grievance would (for all the evidence shows, and as the district court found) have continued to stew in his rage and ignorance indefinitely, and had no formed design about what to do. The government agent supplied a design and gave it form, so that the agent rather than the defendant inspired the crime, provoked it, planned it, financed it, equipped it, and furnished the time and targets. He had to, because Cromitie was comically incompetent, possibly the last candidate one would pick as the agent of a conspiracy.” Id. at 230.
Had the Government not contrived its elaborate sting operation, it is highly likely that Cromitie would have lived out his life in Newburgh, quite possibly cycling in and out of jail for a string of petty offenses, but never committing a crime remotely like the ones for which he has been sitting in a federal penitentiary for 15 years. My misgivings about how the Government ensnared and then arranged things so that these men could be charged with crimes that carried a 25 year mandatory minimum factored significantly in my decision not to sentence them to more than the mandatory minimum (their Guideline, predictably, was life). I was fully aware, at the time the sentence was imposed, that it did not accord with the so-called “parsimony clause” in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a); as noted above, I said so.
Prior related post: