The mother of the North Bergen man serving 22 years on terrorism-related charges told The Jersey Journal Tuesday that she feels her son’s sentencing 10 minutes after the Boston Marathon bombing led to an injustice.
“It was at the same time, the same minutes,” Nadia Alessa, 53, said at her North Bergen home of the sentencing of her son, Mohamed Alessa, 23, who is in a federal correctional facility in Brooklyn.
“I don’t think the judge had any mercy in his heart,” Nadia Alessa said of U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise who also sentenced her son’s codefendant, Carlos Almonte, 27, of Elmwood Park, on April 15 in Newark to 20 years in prison. “There was no mercy. If he had mercy, not even for my son, for me ... I don’t have anyone but him.”
Alessa said killers receive sentences as severe as her son and she said he hurt no one.
“In court they said ‘Mohamed said to Carlos. Carlos said to Mohamed.’ They never said ‘Mohamed did.’ They never said ‘Carlos did,’” the mother said.
The pair were arrested at JFK International Airport in 2010 as they were about to board separate flights to Egypt and they pleaded guilty in 2011 to conspiring to join an armed Islamic group in Somalia with ties to al-Qaida.
At a press conference after the guilty pleas, U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman said, “Their aim was to murder people with beliefs not aligned with their own extremist philosophy ... They wanted to commit violence on non-believers.”
After the sentencing, the pairs’ attorneys filed motions to have the sentence reconsidered, alleging the judge had been influenced by the Boston bombing and the government had changed its approach at the sentencing based on it’s knowledge of the bombing.
Federal prosecutors went from discussing the characteristics of the defendants to instead focusing on “the vulnerability of the American urban environment to terrorist attack,” according to a defense motion.
The defense attorneys argued federal prosecutors handling the Alessa/Almonte case were handed a note by a federal agent minutes after the Boston bombing and the government sought “to conceal, then exploit,” the information. The attorneys said they would have asked for a delay if they had been aware of the Boston attacks.
One of the federal prosecutors is the chief of the National Security Unit for the US Attorney’s Office in Newark.
Debevoise said in court filings that he “first learned of the Boston events when someone mentioned them to me when I was about to re-enter the courtroom to impose a final sentence. They had nothing to do with the sentence I imposed.”
Rebekah Carmichael, spokeswoman for the US Attorney’s Office, said today that the Boston bombing had no impact on the presentation by prosecutors at the sentencing nor on the sentences they sought.
“Issues regarding deterrence, including related to domestic terrorism, were raised by the government at the sentencing hearing before it had any knowledge of the bombing,” Carmichael said.
As for the note passed to prosecutors, Carmichael said, “It’s hardly remarkable that the chief of the Office of the National Security Unit would be notified of an attack shortly after it happened.”