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http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/14969768.htm

Posted on Wed, Jul. 05, 2006

"Resentencing for suspected Hezbollah cell leader
Judge must reconsider 155-year term"
By GARY L. WRIGHT
The Charlotte Observer

ARTICLE SNIPPET: "CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Mohamad Hammoud has spent nearly six years behind bars for conspiring to aid Middle Eastern terrorists. The 32-year-old suspected leader of a Hezbollah cell in Charlotte is serving a sentence that runs through 2135.

But he hopes to get out of prison in a few months.

U.S. District Judge Graham Mullen in February 2003 handed Hammoud the maximum penalty and what amounted to a life sentence: 155 years in prison.

But the federal judge must sentence Hammoud again.

Hammoud's case is among hundreds that the U.S. Supreme Court has sent back to courts across the country following its decision last year to abandon nearly two decades of federal sentencing practices.

The Supreme Court justices said federal judges no longer have to follow the complex system of guidelines that Congress designed in the 1980s to make prison terms tougher and more uniform.

The nation's highest court didn't toss out the sentencing guidelines altogether. The guidelines, the justices ruled, are to be advisory -- not mandatory, as they had been."