Despite pleading guilty to a hate crime, the woman who threatened to blow up a parochial school over its acknowledgment of same-sex unions is free after receiving a sentence of time served, amounting to just over fifteen months in jail.
In 2019 the alumni newsletter for Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School announced a change in policy: It would announce the marriages of graduates in same-sex marriages, just as it had always announced those of opposite-sex couples. Incensed former student Sonia Tabizada telephoned the school and uttered threats on their voicemail, demanding that same-sex couples be excluded from the magazine and threatening to blow up the school if her demands were not met.
She was charged with obstructing religious exercise by threat and transmitting bomb threats in interstate commerce, but finagled a plea bargain by admitting to the religious terrorism part if prosecutors would forget the part about the bombing.
The maximum sentence for such a crime is 20 years in prison plus three years’ supervised release, but Tabizada will serve only a fraction of that. In addition, she will have to live with two years of “supervised release with special conditions” — which, according to the Justice Department, essentially means that if she wants to leave the country in the next 24 months, she has to ask the Court’s permission.
It’s an inconvenience, to be sure, perhaps softened by the fact that nobody’s really free to travel right now anyway.
On the other hand, she did utter the phrase, “I’m going to f**king kill your kids” in a voicemail message to a school, and that makes a short sentence and a spot of inconvenience seem like she’s getting away rather lightly.