The U.S. government’s power to categorize individuals as terrorist suspects and therefore ineligible for certain long-standing constitutional protections has expanded exponentially since 9/11, all the while remaining resistant to oversight. Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions provides a comprehensive and uniquely up-to-date dissection of the government’s advantages over suspects in criminal prosecutions of terrorism. In this critical examination of terrorism prosecutions in federal court, Professor Said reveals a phenomenon at odds with basic constitutional protections for criminal defendants.
Wadie Said’s scholarship analyzes the challenges inherent in the modern terrorism prosecution, covering such topics as coercive interrogation, the use of informants, and the ban on providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations.
Professor Said was an assistant federal public defender in the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Florida, where he represented one of the defendants in U.S. v. Al-Arian, a complex terrorism conspiracy case. He clerked for Chief Judge Charles P. Sifton of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York and worked as a litigation associate in the New York office of Debevoise and Plimpton. Wadie Said graduated from Princeton University and the Columbia University School of Law.