Examining the Outcome of Investigations and Prosecutions of Extremism in the United States

Abstract

While the criminology literature indicates that investigative and judicial outcomes can be influenced by several factors, a smaller number of scholars have examined how similar factors operate in terrorism investigations and prosecutions. We use the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) and American Terror Study (ATS) datasets to examine the factors that influence outcomes in such cases from 1947 to 2017. We find that the ideological affiliation, leadership activity, and the commission of an act of violence increase the severity of the legal outcome, while other factors such as gender, age, race, and biographic availability have less consistent impact.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The U.S. Department of Justice arrested and charged Elizabeth Lecron and Vincent Armstrong with plotting attacks against a local bar and a pipeline. Both individuals pled guilty. Kate Snyder, “Toledo Woman in Bar Attack Plot Sentenced to 15 Years,” The Blade, November 20, 2019.

2 Matthew B. Robinson, Justice Blind? Ideals and Realities of American Criminal Justice (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2002); Stephanie S. Covington, and Barbara E. Bloom, “Gendered Justice: Women in the Criminal Justice System,” in Gendered Justice: Addressing Female Offenders, ed. Barbara E. Bloom (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2003); Tyler Clemons, “Blind Injustice: The Supreme Court, Implicit Racial Bias, and the Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System,” American Criminal Law Review 51, no. 3 (2014): 689–714; Shima Baughman, Sunita Sah, and Christopher T. Robertson, “Blinding Prosecutors to Defendants’ Race: A Policy Proposal to Reduce Unconscious Bias in the Criminal Justice System,” Behavioral Science & Policy 1, no. 2 (2015): 69–76.

3 Arie Perliger, Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, and Ami Pedahzur, “The Gap Between Participation and Violence: Why We Need to Disaggregate Terrorist ‘Profiles’,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2016): 220–9; Tyler Evans, Daniel J. Milton, and Joseph K. Young, “Choosing to Fight, Choosing to Die: Examining How ISIS Foreign Fighters Select Their Operational Roles,” International Studies Review 23, no. 3 (2021): 509–531.

4 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Handbook on Criminal Justice Responses to Terrorism (Vienna: United Nations, 2009), 50.

5 John Horgan, “From Profiles to Pathways and Roots to Routes: Perspectives from Psychology on Radicalization into Terrorism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 618, no. 1 (2008): 80–94; Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko, “Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways Toward Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 20, no. 3 (2008): 415–33; Mia Bloom, Bombshell: Women and Terrorism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

6 McCauley and Moskalenko, “Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways Toward Terrorism”; J. M. Berger, Extremism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018)

7 Horgan, “From Profiles to Pathways and Roots to Routes,” p. 92.

8 Perliger et al., “The Gap Between Participation and Violence.”

9 Darrell Steffensmeier and Chester L. Britt, “Judges’ Race and Judicial Decision Making: Do Black Judges Sentence Differently?” Social Science Quarterly 82, no. 4 (2001): 749–64; Paula M. Kautt, “Location, Location, Location: Interdistrict and Intercircuit Variation in Sentencing Outcomes for Federal Drug-Trafficking Offenses,” Justice Quarterly 19, no. 4 (2002): 633–71; Brian D. Johnson, “The Multilevel Context of Criminal Sentencing: Integrating Judge- and County-Level Influences,” Criminology 44, no. 2 (2006): 259–98.

10 Darrell Steffensmeier, John Kramer, and Jeffery Ulmer, “Age Differences in Sentencing,” Justice Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1995): 583–602; Kathleen Daly and Michael Tonry, “Gender, Race, and Sentencing,” Crime and Justice 22 (1997): 201–52; David B. Mustard, “Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in Sentencing: Evidence from the U.S. Federal Courts,” Journal of Law and Economics 44, no. 1 (2001): 285–314; Celesta A. Albonetti, “The Joint Conditioning Effect of Defendant’s Gender and Ethnicity on Length of Imprisonment under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Drug Trafficking/Manufacturing Offenders,” Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice 6, no. 1 (2002): 39–60; Darrell Steffensmeier and Stephen Demuth, “Does Gender Modify the Effects of Race–ethnicity on Criminal Sanctioning? Sentences for Male and Female White, Black, and Hispanic Defendants,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 22, no. 3 (2006): 241–61; Jill K. Doerner and Stephen Demuth, “The Independent and Joint Effects of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age on Sentencing Outcomes in U.S. Federal Courts,” Justice Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2010): 1–27; Jill K. Doerner and Stephen Demuth, “Gender and Sentencing in the Federal Courts: Are Women Treated More Leniently?” Criminal Justice Policy Review 25, no. 2 (2010): 242–69; David S. Abrams, Marianne Bertrand, and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?” Journal of Legal Studies 41, no. 2 (2012): 347–83; Natalie Goulette, John Wooldredge, James Frank, and Lawrence Travis III, “From Initial Appearance to Sentencing: Do Female Defendants Experience Disparate Treatment?” Journal of Criminal Justice 43, no. 5 (2015): 406–17.

11 Darrell Steffensmeier, Jeffery Ulmer, and John Kramer, “The Interaction of Race, Gender, and Age in Criminal Sentencing: The Punishment Cost of Being Young, Black, and Male,” Criminology 36, no. 4 (1998): 763–98; Albonetti, “The Joint Conditioning Effect of Defendant’s Gender and Ethnicity”; Theodore R. Curry, Gang Lee, and S. Fernando Rodriguez, “Does Victim Gender Increase Sentence Severity? Further Explorations of Gender Dynamics and Sentencing Outcomes,” Crime & Delinquency 50, no. 3 (2004): 319–43; Steffensmeier and Demuth, “Does Gender Modify the Effects of Race–ethnicity on Criminal Sanctioning?”; Jawjeong Wu and Cassia Spohn, “Does an Offender’s Age Have an Effect on Sentence Length?: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Criminal Justice Policy Review 20, no. 4 (2009): 379–413; Tina L. Freiburger, “The Effects of Gender, Family Status, and Race on Sentencing Decisions,” Behavioral Sciences & the Law 28, no. 3 (2010): 378–95; Megan L. Davidson and Jeffrey W. Rosky, “Dangerousness or Diminished Capacity? Exploring the Association of Gender and Mental Illness with Violent Offense Sentence Length,” American Journal of Criminal Justice 40, no. 2 (2015): 353–76; Goulette et al., “From Initial Appearance to Sentencing”; Rob Tillyer, Richard D. Hartley, and Jeffrey T. Ward, “Does Criminal History Moderate the Effect of Gender on Sentence Length in Federal Narcotics Cases?” Criminal Justice and Behavior 42, no. 7 (2015): 703–21.

12 In the United States, sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums which differ depending on the alleged crime, judicial discretion or the lack thereof, and the decision to accept a plea bargain will all have impacts on sentence length for alleged offenders. The United States Sentencing Commission (ussc.gov), an independent agency within the judicial branch, provides detailed discussion of the role that each of these plays in the sentence lengths of alleged offenders. It should also be noted that underneath the federal guidelines, all 50 states also provide their own guidelines for these matters which complicates matters tremendously. While an older piece, the National Center for State Courts, in 2008, put out a document (https://www.ncsc.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/25474/state_sentencing_guidelines.pdf) on state sentencing guidelines and highlighted the difficulty of collecting and making sense of the significant differences one can find in different state court systems.

13 Boaz Ganor, “Defining Terrorism: Is One Man’s Terrorist another Man’s Freedom Fighter?” Police Practice and Research 3, no. 4 (2002): 287–304; Alex P. Schmid, “Terrorism as Psychological Warfare,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 2 (2005), 197–221; Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

14 An in-depth discussion of gender and terrorism as well as current examples and analyses on women in this sphere can be found in other work. Rachel Yon and Daniel Milton, “Simply Small Men? Examining Differences Between Females and Males Radicalized in the United States,” Women & Criminal Justice 29, no. 4–5 (2019): 188–203.

15 Female extremists and male extremists will refer to those individuals who have been suspected of acts of terrorism.

16 Covington and Bloom, “Gendered Justice”; Joanne Belknap, “Culturally-Focused Batterer Counseling,” Criminology & Public Policy 6, no. 2 (2007): 337–40; Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa Pasko, The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2013).

17 Belknap, “Culturally-Focused Batterer Counseling.”

18 Brent L. Smith and Kelly R. Damphousse, “Punishing Political Offenders: The Effect of Political Motive on Federal Sentencing Decisions,” Criminology 34, no. 3 (1996): 289–319; Mindy S. Bradley-Engen, Kelly R. Damphousse, and Brent L. Smith, “Punishing Terrorists: A Re-Examination of U.S. Federal Sentencing in the Postguidelines Era,” International Criminal Justice Review 19, no. 4 (2009): 433–55; Joanna Amirault and Martin Bouchard, “Timing is everything: The role of contextual and terrorism-specific factors in the sentencing outcomes of terrorist offenders,” European Journal of Criminology 14, no. 3 (2017): 269–89.

19 Audrey Alexander and Rebecca Turkington, “Treatment of Terrorists: How Does Gender Affect Justice?” CTC Sentinel 11, no. 8 (2018): 24–9. This conclusion had only received mixed support previously. Smith and Damphousse (1996) had not found much support for the relationship between gender and legal outcomes, whereas Bradley-Engen et al. (2009) had found some support in their empirical analysis.

20 Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989); Cindy D. Ness, Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008); Michael Martinez, Ana Cabrera, and Sara Weisfeldt, “Colorado Woman Gets 4 Years for Wanting to Join ISIS,” CNN, January 24, 2015; Audrey Young, “Rise in Kiwi Women heading to Iraq and Syria,” New Zealand Herald, December 8, 2015.

21 Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1991); Meda Chesney-Lind, “Policing Women’s Bodies: Law, Crime, Sexuality, and Reproduction,” Women & Criminal Justice 27, no. 1 (2017): 1–3; Lisa Pasko, “Beyond Confinement: The Regulation of Girl Offenders’ Bodies, Sexual Choices, and Behavior,” Women & Criminal Justice 27, no. 1 (2017): 4–20. It is also worth noting that research in terrorism studies has also observed that the treatment of women, either by groups, the media, or others, is also different than that of men. Brigitte L. Nacos, “The Portrayal of Female Terrorists in the Media: Similar Framing Patterns in the News Coverage of Women in Politics and in Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 28, no. 5 (2005): 435–51; Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, eds., Women, Gender, and Terrorism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Kathy Laster and Edna Erez, “Sisters in Terrorism? Exploding Stereotypes,” Women & Criminal Justice 25, no. 1–2 (2015): 83–99.

22 James D. Johnson, Erik Whitestone, Lee A. Jackson, and Leslie Gatto, “Justice is Still Not Colorblind: Differential Racial Effects of Exposure to Inadmissible Evidence,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21, no. 9 (1995): 893–98; Andrew Gelman, Jeffrey Fagan, and Alex Kiss, “An Analysis of the New York City Police Department’s “Stop-and-Frisk” Policy in the Context of Claims of Racial Bias,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 102, no. 479 (2007): 813–23.

23 Fathali M. Moghaddam, “The Staircase to Terrorism: A Psychological Explanation,” American Psychologist 60, no. 2 (2005): 161–69.

24 Carl E. Pope, Rick Lovell, and Heidi M. Hsia, Disproportionate Minority Confinement: A Review of the Research Literature From 1989 Through 2001 (Rockville, MD: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2002); Christopher Hartney and Fabiana Silva, And justice for some: Differential treatment of youth of color in the justice system; Margaret B. Kovera, “Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System: Prevalence, Causes, and a Search for Solutions,” Journal of Social Issues 75, no. 4 (2019): 1139–64.

25 Breakdown of these numbers can be found at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019women.html

26 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, 2020.

27 The most recent Census Bureau estimate can be found at https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/.

28 These statistics come from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and can be accessed at https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp

29 George S. Bridges, Robert D. Crutchfield, and Edith E. Simpson, “Crime, Social Structure, and Criminal Punishment: White and Nonwhite Rates of Imprisonment,” Social Problems 34, no. 4 (1987): 345–61; Michael Tonry, “The Social, Psychological, and Political Causes of Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System,” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 39 (2010): 273–312; Daniel P. Mears, Joshua C. Cochran, and Andrea M. Lindsey, “Offending and Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Criminal Justice: A Conceptual Framework for Guiding Theory and Research and Informing Policy,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 32, no. 1 (2016): 78–103.

30 Wu and Spohn, “Does an Offender’s Age Have an Effect on Sentence Length.”

31 Brian Dodwell, Daniel Milton, and Don Rassler, The Caliphate’s Global Workforce: An Insider’s Look at the Islamic State’s Foreign Fighter Paper Trail (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, 2016); John Horgan, Mia Bloom, Chelsea Daymon, Wojciech Kaczkowski, and Hicham Tiflati, “A New Age of Terror? Older Fighters in the Caliphate,” CTC Sentinel 10, no. 5 (2017): 13–9.

32 Mia Bloom and John Horgan, Small Arms: Children and Terrorism (Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

33 Daniel Milton and Don Rassler, Minor Misery: What an Islamic State Registry Says About the Challenges of Minors in the Conflict Zone (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, 2019).

34 Alan J. Tomkins, Andrew J. Slain, Marianne N. Hallinan, and Cynthia E. Willis, “Subtle Discrimination in Juvenile Justice Decisionmaking: Social Scientific Perspectives and Explanations,” Creighton Law Review 29 (1996): 1619–52; John R. Sutton, Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States, 1640–1981 (London: University of California Press, 1998); David S. Tanenhaus, Juvenile Justice in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Howard Abadinsky, Law and Justice: An Introduction to the American Legal System (New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2008).

35 Elizabeth S. Scott, “The Legal Construction of Childhood,” in A Century of Juvenile Justice, Margaret K Rosenheim, Franklin E. Zimring, David S. Tanenhaus, and Bernardine Dohrn, eds. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); David Myers, “Adult Crime, Adult Time: Punishing Violent Youth in the Adult Criminal Justice System,” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 1, no. 2 (2003): 173–97; Megan C. Kurlychek, “Effectiveness of Juvenile Transfer to Adult Court: Implications from Current Research and Directions for Future Study,” Criminology and Public Policy 15, no. 3 (2016): 897–900.

36 Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Arie Perliger, American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

37 Gregory L. Wiltfang and Doug McAdam, “The Costs and Risks of Social Activism: A Study of Sanctuary Movement Activism,” Social Forces 69, no. 4 (1991): 987–1010; Alan Schussman and Sarah A. Soule, “Process and Protest: Accounting for Individual Protest Participation,” Social Forces 84, no. 2 (2005): 1083–1108; Perliger et al., “The Gap Between Participation and Violence.”

38 Leonard Weinberg, Amir Pedazur, and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, “The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 4 (2004): 777–94; Alex P. Schmid, “The Revised Academic Consensus Definition of Terrorism,” Perspectives on Terrorism 6, no. 2 (2012): 158–59; Anthony Richards, “Conceptualizing Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 37, no. 3 (2014): 213–36.

39 Hoffman, Inside Terrorism.

40 Perliger et al., “The Gap Between Participation and Violence.”

41 Bryan Price, “Targeting Top Terrorists: How Leadership Decapitation Contributes to Counterterrorism,” International Security 36, no. 4 (2012): 9–46; Jenna Jordan, “Attacking the Leader, Missing the Mark: Why Terrorist Groups Survive Decapitation Strikes,” International Security 38, no. 4 (2014): 7–38; Jenna Jordan, Leadership Decapitation: Strategic Targeting of Terrorist Organizations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Bryan Price, Targeting Top Terrorists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

42 Steven Talbot, “‘Us’ and ‘Them’: Terrorism, Conflict and (O)ther Discursive Formations,” Sociological Research Online 13, no. 1 (2008): 15–30; Liane Rothenberger, Kathrin Muller, and Ahmed Elmezeny, “The Discursive Construction of Terrorist Group Identity,” Terrorism and Political Violence 30, no. 3 (2018): 428–53.

43 Dipak K. Gupta, “Toward an Integrated Behavioral Framework for Analyzing Terrorism: Individual Motivations to Group Dynamics,” Democracy and Security 1, no. 1 (2005): 5–31; Hoffman, Inside Terrorism; Bertjan Doosje, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Arie W. Kruglanski, Arjan de Wolf, Liesbeth Mann, and Allard R. Feddes, “Terrorism, Radicalization, and De-Radicalization,” Current Opinion in Psychology 11 (2006): 79–84; Berger, Extremism.

44 Talbot, “‘Us’ and ‘Them’.”

45 Erin M. Kearns, Allison M. Betus, and Anthony F. Lemiuex, “Why Do Some Terrorist Attacks Receive More Media Attention Than Others?” Justice Quarterly 36, no. 6 (2019), 985–1022; Erin M. Kearns, Allison M. Betus, and Anthony F. Lemiuex, “When Data Do Not Matter: Exploring Public Perceptions of Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (forthcoming).

46 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) [Data file] (University of Maryland, 2017). Retrieved from http://www.start.umd.edu/data-tools/profiles-individual-radicalization-united-states-pirus.

47 Brent L. Smith, Terrorism in America: Pipe bombs and pipe dreams (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); Smith and Damphousse, “Punishing Political Offenders.”

48 Martha A. Myers, “Common Law in Action: The Prosecution of Felonies and Misdemeanors,” Sociological Inquiry 52, no. 1 (1982): 1–15.

49 There are 433 individuals in PIRUS under this category. It is impossible to ascertain whether they were not being pursued because they did not commit an actionable offense or because they were the beneficiaries of some form of legal discretion, despite being identified by the PIRUS team as being associated with extremism. Because the names of individuals are not presented in the PIRUS dataset, additional coding or verification is difficult. Thus, some caution is merited in interpreting the findings associated with this variable.

50 David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Rebel Terror and September 11,” Anthropoetics, 8, no. 1 (2002).

51 Tom C. Smith, “Crime Legislation Passes in Election Year,” Criminal Justice 11, no. 2 (1996): 50–51.

52 Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, “After 9/11: Is it all Different Now?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 2 (2005): 259–77.

53 Alexander and Turkington, “Treatment of Terrorists.”

54 The circumstances of this particular individual’s release is not known, so it cannot be said that his cooperation was tied to his release, although such a conclusion is not unlikely. Daniel Milton and Muhammad al-’Ubaydi, “Stepping Out from the Shadows: The Interrogation of the Islamic State’s Future Caliph,” CTC Sentinel 13, no. 9 (2020): 1–13.

55 Alanna Durkin Richer, “Proud Boys Leader was Government Informant, Records Show,” Associated Press¸ January 27, 2021.

56 Bruce Hoffman, Edwin Meese III, and Timothy J. Roemer, The FBI: Protecting the Homeland in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: The FBI 9/11 Review Commission, 2015), p. 25.

57 Ryan Raffaelli, Tiona Zuzul, Ranjay Gulati, and Jan Rivkin, Transforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Outcome and Process Framing in the Context of a Strategic Change Initiative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 2019), pp. 17–18.

58 Alexander and Turkington, “Treatment of Terrorists.”

59 Yon and Milton. “Simply Small Men?.”

60 Bruce Hoffman, “Domestic Terrorism Strikes U.S. Capitol, and Democracy,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 7, 2021.

61 Dagmar P. Heinrich, Amy E. Thornton, Ruth M. Morgan, and Noemie Bouhana, “An Analysis of Forensic Evidence used in the Prosecution of Terrorism Cases in Britain between 1972 and 2008,” Policing 7, no. 1 (2013): 96–108.

62 Thomas Renard, “Overblown: Exploring the Gap Between the Fear of Terrorist Recidivism and the Evidence,” CTC Sentinel 13, no. 4 (2020): 19–29.