MIAMI, Sept. 9 (UPI) -- Jose Padilla, the Chicago gang member turned al-Qaida militant who spent more than three years in a Navy brig, was given a 21-year term in federal prison Tuesday.
At a hearing in Miami, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke added time to the 17 1/2-year sentence she gave Padilla after his 2007 conviction on charges of aiding terrorism. An appeals court found that the original sentence was too short, given Padilla's criminal history.
Federal prosecutors asked Cooke to give Padilla the maximum, 30 years. But Michael Caruso, a federal public defender, described Padilla's difficult time during 3 1/2 years being held without charges in a Naval brig in South Carolina and in several years of almost total isolation in a Supermax prison in Colorado.
"He has sunk into a pit of hopelessness and despair," Caruso told the judge, asking for 21 years.
In her original sentence, Cooke deducted the time Padilla spent in the brig. On Tuesday, she simply added it back.
Padilla was born in New York and spent much of his life in Chicago before moving to the Fort Lauderdale area. There, he was recruited to al-Qaida.
Prosecutors, when they appealed his original sentence, said Padilla's term was only 20 months longer than that given a co-defendant who had no criminal record.
