Long Timelines Not Uncommon in Domestic Terrorism Cases

ADAMS, Mass. — It has been more than nine months since an Adams man was arrested and his Murray Street apartment was searched by the FBI.

It has been nine months since the U.S. Attorney's Office announced that Alexander Ciccolo was charged with violating a federal weapons possession law and released a detention memo outlining the ISIS sympathies of the 23-year-old man who also went by the name Ali Al Amriki.

But to date, there have been no terrorism charges leveled against Ciccolo, and it is weeks away from the next status conference at which additional charges could be announced.

"Because of the nature of the case ... it involves a lot more people," U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Regan told Magistrate Judge Katherine A. Robertson in February.

The protracted timeline of the United States vs. Alexander Ciccolo may seem unusual, but similar cases in recent years can take months if not years to adjudicate, according to data culled from various media sources tracking domestic terrorism cases from coast to coast.

In July, about three weeks after Ciccolo's arrest, a research attorney in the public defender's office in Western New York compiled a list of 36 different cases involving 65 individuals nationwide.

The July 29 memo, interestingly, includes Ciccolo's case, even though it was one of the few where no allegations of "Attempting to Provide Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization," the most common charge, were made.

The 36 cases (plus one other that turned up in an Internet search of cases in the memo) all began with arrests between March 2014 and July 2015.

Of those 37 cases, 14 — including Ciccolo's — remain completely open. A couple are scheduled to go to trial this spring. One, the case of the U.S. vs. David "Daoud" Wright and Nicholas Rovinski has a February 2017 trial date.

Of the remaining 23 cases examined, most resulted in either a guilty plea or a conviction for at least one of the parties involved, with the vast majority including plea agreements.

In fact, the March 17 conviction of ISIS supporter Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem was "the country's first jury trial involving a violent act committed in the name of the Islamic State," according to New York Times. The Arizona man was found guilty by a jury of four men and eight women for his role in a 2015 attack outside the "Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest" in Garland, Texas.

Twenty of the cases that began in the March 2014 to July 2015 time frame ended in plea agreements for at least one of the defendants named. Sentences have ranged from 48 months up to more than 20 years in prison.

At the low end, Colorado's Shannon Maureen Conley was sentenced to four years in prison and three years of postrelease supervision.

Conley was 19 when she was arrested in April 2014 and charged with "Conspiracy to Provide Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization." As part of her September 2014 guilty plea, she "agreed to cooperate with the USAO against other individuals named and unnamed in the indictment," according to the memo from the Public Defenders Office.

At the high end, Donald Ray Morgan, also known as Nasser Abdul Raheem, of North Carolina, pleaded to multiple counts with sentences totaling 243 months in prison plus three years postrelease supervision. Morgan was arrested in August 2014 at JFK Airport after a flight from the Middle East, where he had attempted to join ISIS in Syria. He pleaded guilty just two months later, in October 2014.

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