Chelsea Bomber Ahmad Rahimi’s lawyers claim their client is being charged in a “combination crime,” meaning the same crime twice even though he committed the crime once- PB/TK
Terrorist’s Team Says Neil Gorsuch Would Side With Them – By Katie Zavadski / June 20 2017
Defense attorneys for accused “Chelsea Bomber” Ahmad Rahimi claimed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch would agree that two charges against their client should be dropped.
The lawyers contend that prosecutors levied charges for the same actions twice: He was charged for allegedly planting bombs two Chelsea locations and also charged with using a “destructive device” in furtherance of a violent crime. The second charge, they contend, requires a “combination crime”—not merely the actions he was already charged for in the first place. They accused Rahimi of “using a bomb while using a bomb,” argued federal defender Matthew Larsen.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys quibbled over the interpretation of the legal language, but Rahimi’s lawyers said that in the event of legal ambiguity, the most lenient interpretation, for the defendant, must win out.
“Now-Justice Gorsuch made this clear,” said Larsen, who referred to a 2015 opinion Gorsuch wrote on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Gorsuch wrote judges “don’t default to the most severe possible interpretation of the statute but to the rule of lenity” when ambiguity exists.
Continue to thedailybeast.com article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/terrorists-team-says-neil-gorsuch-would-side-with-them
