Gupta, part of a group of lawyers representing Payen and the Willamses, who are not related. “We are tremendously pleased that our clients are on their way home - even if it’s fourteen years too late,” said Amith R. She said that would allow time for probation officials to prepare and for Payen’s lawyer to line up supportive housing for the man, who has a severe mental illness. A message seeking comment was sent to the FBI.Ĭiting concerns for the men’s health and her own qualms about the case, McMahon cut the 25-year mandatory minimum sentences she imposed on them in 2011 to time served plus 90 days. attorney’s office declined to comment on the judge’s decision. She excoriated the government for sending “a villain” of an informant “to troll among the poorest and weakest of men for ‘terrorists’ who might prove susceptible to an offer of much-needed cash in exchange for committing a faux crime.” She said that it was “heinous” of the men to agree to participate in what she called the government’s “made for TV movie.” But, the judge added, “the sentence was the product of a fictitious plot to do things that these men had never remotely contemplated, and that were never going to happen.”
“The real lead conspirator was the United States,” McMahon wrote in granting the men’s request for compassionate release, effective in three months. District Judge Colleen McMahon said in her ruling Thursday. Onta Williams, David Williams and Laguerre Payen - three of the men known as the “Newburgh Four” - were “hapless, easily manipulated and penurious petty criminals” caught up more than a decade ago in a scheme driven by overzealous FBI agents and a dodgy informant, U.S. NEW YORK (AP) - Three men convicted in a post-9/11 terrorism sting have been ordered freed from prison by a judge who deemed their lengthy sentences “unduly harsh and unjust” and decried the FBI’s role in radicalizing them in a plot to blow up New York synagogues and shoot down National Guard planes.
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