Court upholds life for alleged terrorist

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that alleged al-Qaida terrorist Mamdouh Mahmud Salim's rights were violated when he received a life sentence via videoconference for stabbing a prison guard, but said the error did not require a new sentencing.

Salim, imprisoned in a high-security federal prison in Colorado, stabbed guard Louis Pepe in the eye with a sharpened comb while awaiting trial in Manhattan in 2000 for conspiring to bomb two embassies in Africa in 1998. He was sentenced in the stabbing by U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts in 2010.

At the time, speaking on a video hookup from prison, he told the judge he was waiving his right to be present because he thought he would be beaten by guards en route to New York, and Batts approved the waiver.

In its decision, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the waiver was not voluntary because it was based on fear, but ruled that the sentence should stand because Salim would almost certainly have gotten life even if he had been present.