No way. Next case!

‘American Taliban’ Lindh asks Bush to reduce 20-year prison term
San Francisco (AP) — The lawyer and parents of John Walker Lindh, the American-born Taliban soldier serving 20 years in prison after his capture in Afghanistan, called on President Bush on Wednesday to commute his sentence and set him free.
The renewed call to shorten the sentence was based on the relatively light term Australian David Hicks received Saturday after pleading guilty to supporting terrorism. Hicks, who had been imprisoned for five years at Guantanamo Bay and acknowledged aiding al-Qaida during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, was given a nine month sentence.

“In the atmosphere of the time, the best John could get was a plea bargain and a 20-year sentence,” said Lindh’s father Frank Lindh. “We love our son very much, he was wrongly accused when he was found in Afghanistan.”

John Walker Lindh, 26, a Marin County native, was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 by American forces sent to topple the Taliban after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He was charged with conspiring to kill Americans and support terrorists but pleaded guilty in 2002 to lesser offenses, including carrying weapons against U.S. forces.
Attorney James Brosnahan brokered the plea deal and said it was the best he could do amid the political climate immediately after Sept. 11.
Lindh had converted to Islam and went to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, Brosnahan said.

“It is a question of proportionality, it is a question of fairness and it is a question of the religious experience John Walker Lindh had and it was not in any way directed at the United States,” Brosnahan said at a press conference Wednesday.

The White House referred telephone calls to the Justice Department, which declined to comment because it had not received the petition, said spokesman Dean Boyd.
Neither the president nor the department have acted on two previous commutation requests.

Wild Thing’s comment…….
OK, so instead of John Walker Lindh shall serve 20 years imprisonment for his joining terrorists in battle against American forces, how about…………You’re in for the full 20, you effing traitor! And your hippie parents can burn in hell along with you.

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
‘This is my own, my native land!’
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.”
Sir Walter Scott.