Mukasey Goes to Court to Argue a Terrorism Case

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey overcame his self-confessed stage fright and told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that it should reinstate an explosives conviction against an Algerian terrorist who had planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in 1999.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey after court on Tuesday.

The court appearance by Mr. Mukasey, a retired federal judge, restored a tradition — broken by Mr. Mukasey’s two predecessors — that an attorney general makes at least one argument before the court on behalf of the government.

The case involves an explosives-related charge against the terrorist, Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested in December 1999 as he tried to cross the border from Canada in a car full of explosives.

Mr. Ressam was convicted on nine criminal counts related to the terrorist plot, scheduled for close to the celebration of the millennium, and is serving a 22-year prison sentence.

An appeals court in San Francisco threw out the ninth count — carrying an explosive during the commission of a felony, in this case, lying to a customs officer. The appeals court ruled that a conviction on that count required a link between the explosives found in Mr. Ressam’s car and the false customs declaration. The appeals court found no such link and overturned the explosives charge, which carried a mandatory 10-year sentence.

Although Mr. Mukasey had told reporters he was nervous about his debut before the court and endured two dress rehearsals before colleagues, he appeared no more jittery on Tuesday than many experienced lawyers who appear regularly before the nine justices. The justices were notably polite to the attorney general but gave no strong clue as to whether they would decide the case in his favor.

In his answers, the attorney general, sporting the traditional formal morning coat worn by government lawyers before the court, was characteristically dry and to the point.

He rejected the reasoning of the lower court and said there was no requirement under the law that the jurors who convicted Mr. Ressam find a connection between the explosives in his car and the false customs declaration. It was enough that the explosives were in the car when the declaration was made, he said.

“Those words are not in the statute that Congress wrote,” Mr. Mukasey said. “And this court has said many times that courts should not add words or elements to criminal statutes.”

Mr. Mukasey acknowledged that prosecutors had attached the explosives charge to the false-statements accusation, rather than to a broader count in Mr. Ressam’s indictment, because it was “a lead-pipe cinch” of a case.

“He had clearly made a false statement,” Mr. Mukasey said. “He had clearly carried an explosive while doing it.”

A lawyer for Mr. Ressam, Thomas W. Hillier, a public defender from Seattle, argued that the explosives law was open to abuse if prosecutors were not required to show a connection between the presence of explosives and a related crime.

Some of the justices appeared to take up the defense case, with Justice Antonin Scalia trying to goad Mr. Mukasey by suggesting that since gasoline is explosive, carrying a can of gasoline in a car could be prosecuted as a serious felony if the car had been used to mail a false tax return.

Mr. Mukasey said that federal prosecutors had a history of showing discretion. “The safeguard that is in the system, in part, involves the history of the system,” he said. “It was Congress’s choice to leave to the judgment of prosecutors the decision of what crimes to charge in conjunction with the possession of explosives, and we think that’s where the authority should remain.”