An American jihadist who used a paintball park to train for combat will be freed after serving 14 years of his 65-year sentence, a Virginia judge ruled Friday.
Seifullah Chapman, 45, was a member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group who traveled to Pakistan in August 2001 to train in its camps.
Chapman, an American citizen, was convicted on terrorism charges in 2004. But a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in April — in which conservative darling Neil Gorsuch voted with the court’s four liberal justices — struck down the law that defined Chapman’s crimes.
“The Constitution looks unkindly on any law so vague that reasonable people cannot understand its terms and judges do not know where to begin in applying it,” Gorsuch wrote.
In another case, a federal judge in Ohio has ruled that the government cannot strip a convicted terrorist of his US citizenship.
Pakistan-born Iyman Faris is serving a 20-year prison sentence for his part in an al Qaeda plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. He is set to be released in 2020.
Faris, who met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, planned to sever the iconic span’s supporting cables. His was one of the first terrorism trials in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.