In this June 26, 1997 booking photo released by the Tom Green County Jail in San Angelo, Texas, is shown Colleen R. LaRose.Federal prosecutors want a long prison sentence for a Pennsylvania woman who called herself “Jihad Jane” online, saying her punishment should serve as a deterrent to “other lonely, vulnerable people who might be enticed by online extremists promising fame and honor.”
Colleen LaRose remains a threat and deserves a “very lengthy” sentence of decades in prison for plotting to kill a Swedish cartoonist who did a caricature of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, prosecutors said in a memorandum filed this week.
The 50-year-old Pennsburg woman and two others convicted in the plot — Jamie Paulin-Ramirez of Colorado and Maryland teen Mohammad Hassan Khalid — are scheduled to be sentenced next week in Philadelphia, with proceedings beginning Monday.
LaRose faces the possibility of life in prison after pleading guilty in 2011 to four federal charges, including conspiracy to murder a foreign target, conspiracy to support terrorists and lying to the FBI.
Prosecutors called LaRose a “lonely and isolated” woman with few friends and an absent boyfriend when she turned to the Internet for distraction. By the middle of 2008, they wrote, she was associating with foreign terrorists who valued her ability to recruit jihadists online.