Mohammed Jabateh, 53, of East Lansdowne is serving 30 years in prison for deceiving U.S. Immigration about his past as a brutal war lord.

Now he wants a federal appeals court in Philadelphia to overturn his conviction and sentence, writes Jeremy Roebuck for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

His lawyers argued their client may have committed murders, rapes, enslavement, torture and ritual cannibalism during the first Liberian civil war between 1989 and 1997, but that did not amount to genocide.

“Liberia, for all its horrors in the early ‘90s, was not Rwanda, not Bosnia, not Cambodia, and not the Third Reich,” Jabateh’s attorney Peter Goldberger said in court papers.

A decision favoring Jabateh could affect a generation of Liberian war victims and a U.S. tactic to weed out war criminals coming to the U.S. by charging them with lying about wartime misdeeds on a political asylum application.

Under discussion is the fact that Jabeteh’s three decade sentence is 17 times greater than the 15 to 21-months called for

Robert A. Zauzmer, chief of appeals for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia, balked at the idea that the Third Circuit judges would give Jabateh’s argument any serious consideration.

Read more about Jabateh here.

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