Omar Khadr, a Canadian previously held at Guantanamo Bay, is attempting to erase his terrorism conviction. Khadr, who was 15 at the time of his actions, was captured by U.S. military forces in a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan. Charges laid against him included providing material support for terrorism, for which he accepted a plea deal from a military commission supported a waiver of his right to appeal. He faced 40 years in prison.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 granted military tribunals the power to try “unlawful enemy combatants” for a list of terrorism-related crimes. However, after Khadr’s guilty plea, it was ruled that these tribunals lacked the authority to try cases of this nature that were not designated as war crimes before the law’s enactment. This ruling was made by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a federal court over the military review court, in an opinion by then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Khadr’s plea deal contained an explicit waiver of his right to appeal. Nevertheless, he is seeking for his conviction to be vacated on the grounds that the conduct he was accused of, it turns out, was not a crime at all. Initially, a military review court in Washington rejected Khadr’s request, adhering to the terms of the plea agreement. However, now in the case of Khadr v. United States, Khadr is requesting that the Supreme Court review and overturn this ruling. He maintains that general waivers of appeal do not deny appellants the right to seek a review of their convictions for non-criminal conduct.
Since being transferred back to Canada in 2012, Khadr was released on bail in 2015 and had his sentence commuted in 2019. As it stands, criminal cases are often settled through plea bargains, where the defendant pleads guilty to a lesser crime or conviction to receive a lesser sentence. In federal court, 98% of cases are resolved this way, while 95% of state court cases are handled similarly.
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