Court Overturns Evergreen Park Woman's Conviction Claiming She Hid Her Terrorist Past

Rasmieh Odeh, now 69, in the 2004 documentary “Women In Struggle,” where she discussed her alleged role in a pair of bombings in Jerusalem in 1969.

An Evergreen Park woman convicted in 2014 of naturalization fraud on claims that she hid her terrorist past when applying for U.S. citizenship could be getting a new trial, Politico reported.

The conviction for Rasmieh Odeh, 69, was unanimously overturned Thursday by a three-judge panel from the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, on grounds that the original federal trial judge misinterpreted case law by precluding an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder to testify for the defense.

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U.S. authorities claimed that Odeh lied on her immigration application about her past conviction by an Israeli military court for her role in a pair of 1969 bombings in Jerusalem allegedly on behalf of the the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine.

One of the bombs detonated at a supermarket killing two people. The second bomb damaged the British Consulate. Odeh and three other Palestinian women were sentenced to life in an Israeli prison. She was released ten years later as part of a prisoner exchange and returned to the West Bank.

Odeh arrived the United States in 1995 and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 2004.

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Up until her arrest by federal agents in October 2013 at her modest apartment building Evergreen Park, Odeh lived a high profile life. She earned a law degree and worked as a community organizer with the Arab-American Action Network.

In 2004, the same year she applied for U.S. citizenship, Odeh was also profiled in a critically acclaimed documentary “Women in Struggle,” where she discussed the bombings and her thoughts on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Following her conviction in a Detroit federal courtroom, she was sentenced last year to 18 months in prison. Odeh was also ordered to be stripped of her U.S. citizenship and deported to Jordan after her prison stint.

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U.S. District Court Judge Gershwin Drain allowed her to remain free on bond as she appealed her case, according to Politico.

Odeh argued in her appeal that she was denied the right to present a complete defense because the district court judge would not allow her expert PTSD witness to testify that she did not know her statements on her citizenship application to be false.

Due to her alleged torture in an Israeli prison, PTSD shaped the way she viewed questions about her criminal history.

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“Because this type of testimony is not categorically inadmissible to negate a defendant’s knowledge of the falsity of a statement, the district court must reconsider the admissibility of the testimony,” the court ruling said.

Prior to her sentencing, federal prosecutors in arguing for a longer sentence called her a “terrorist icon.”

The decision by the federal courts appeal could pave the way for a new trial, unless the government or defense appeals the decision to the full bench of the 6th Circuit or the Supreme Court.

“I am happy and pleased, and it was somewhat what I thought would be the result,” Odeh’s attorney, Michael Deutsch, told Poltico. “The long and short of it is we’ll be back in front of [Drain], and he’ll have to decide if the expert testimony can be excluded on some other ground.”