Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
- 28,003
- 9,607
- 910
Seeking new trial, ex-warlord living in Delco questions whether murders, rapes, torture, and cannibalism make him a genocidal war criminal
A Delaware County man serving a 30-year prison term for hiding his past as a brutal Liberian warlord to gain entry into the United States urged a federal appeals court in Philadelphia on Tuesday to overturn his conviction and sentence.
Lawyers for Mohammed Jabateh, 53, of East Lansdowne, argued that their client may have committed numerous murders, rapes, and acts of enslavement, torture and ritual cannibalism during the first Liberian civil war — a protracted, multifaction conflict that ravaged the West African nation between 1989 and 1997 — but as terrible as those crimes were, they did not necessarily amount to genocide.
“Liberia, for all its horrors in the early ‘90s, was not Rwanda, not Bosnia, not Cambodia, and not the Third Reich,” Jabateh’s attorney Peter Goldberger said in court papers. “Genocide is a term with a precise and narrow meaning.”
That distinction could prove key as a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit considers whether to upend a historic verdict that resonated from Philadelphia’s sizable community of West African expats to Liberia, a nation more than 4,500 miles away.
Ex-warlord living in Delco questions whether murders, rapes, torture, and cannibalism make him a war criminal
I'm not sure 30 years was enough. I know, it's complicated.
A Delaware County man serving a 30-year prison term for hiding his past as a brutal Liberian warlord to gain entry into the United States urged a federal appeals court in Philadelphia on Tuesday to overturn his conviction and sentence.
Lawyers for Mohammed Jabateh, 53, of East Lansdowne, argued that their client may have committed numerous murders, rapes, and acts of enslavement, torture and ritual cannibalism during the first Liberian civil war — a protracted, multifaction conflict that ravaged the West African nation between 1989 and 1997 — but as terrible as those crimes were, they did not necessarily amount to genocide.
“Liberia, for all its horrors in the early ‘90s, was not Rwanda, not Bosnia, not Cambodia, and not the Third Reich,” Jabateh’s attorney Peter Goldberger said in court papers. “Genocide is a term with a precise and narrow meaning.”
That distinction could prove key as a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit considers whether to upend a historic verdict that resonated from Philadelphia’s sizable community of West African expats to Liberia, a nation more than 4,500 miles away.
Ex-warlord living in Delco questions whether murders, rapes, torture, and cannibalism make him a war criminal
I'm not sure 30 years was enough. I know, it's complicated.
