Judge Orders Release of Three of ‘Newburgh Four,’ Criticizing F.B.I. (original) (raw)

New York|Judge Orders Release of Three of ‘Newburgh Four,’ Criticizing F.B.I.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/nyregion/newburgh-four-terrorism-fbi.html

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Judge Colleen McMahon of U.S. District Court suggested that the federal agency had “invented” a conspiracy.

A man in a white T-shirt, his hands cuffed behind him, is led by the arm by a man in a blue windbreaker with “FBI” printed on it as they pass photographers whose flashbulbs are illuminated.

Onta Williams, one of the three members of the Newburgh Four who were freed by a federal judge, being led by an F.B.I. agent in 2009. Credit...Michael Appleton for The New York Times

July 27, 2023

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the “compassionate release” of three Hudson Valley men who were part of a group known as the “Newburgh Four” after finding that F.B.I. agents had used an “unscrupulous operative” to persuade them to join a plot to blow up synagogues and bring down military planes more than a decade ago.

The decision, by Judge Colleen McMahon of United States District Court in Manhattan, was scathing in its description of the methods used by the F.B.I. in its pursuit of the three — Onta Williams, Laguerre Payen and David Williams — calling the plot in which they were convicted of participating in 2010 “an F.B.I.-orchestrated conspiracy.”

“A person reading the crimes of conviction in this case would be left with the impression that the offending defendants were sophisticated international terrorists committed to jihad against the United States,” Judge McMahon wrote. “However, they were, in actual reality, hapless, easily manipulated and penurious petty criminals.”

Under the judge’s order, Onta Williams’s, David Williams’s and Mr. Payen’s sentences will be reduced to time served plus 90 days. They were sentenced in 2011 to at least 25 years in prison.

During the trial, a fourth defendant — James Cromitie — was presented as being a key player in the plot, though Judge McMahon seemed most aggrieved by Shahed Hussain, a longtime F.B.I. informant. He later became infamous as the owner of a down-market limousine company that rented a defective vehicle to a group of partygoers in 2018, leading to 20 deaths.

In the Newburgh case, Judge McMahon wrote that Mr. Hussain — whom she described as “most unsavory” — had lured Mr. Cromitie in 2007 “with promises of both heavenly and earthly rewards, including as much as $250,000, if he would plan and participate in, and find others to participate in, a jihadist ‘mission.’”

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