LANSING (AP) -- The Michigan Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a defendant who plotted a massacre at his high school won't be sentenced to a longer term for making terrorist threats.
The case involves Andrew Osantowski, who in 2004 sent messages to an Internet chat room saying he might kill fellow students at Chippewa Valley High School near Mount Clemens. Osantowski was convicted of threatening an act of terrorism and using a computer to threaten terrorism.
The dispute is how to calculate his sentence, and potentially future defendants, charged with terrorist acts. The case appears to have been one of the first in the country to apply anti-terrorism laws to threats of school violence.
The court ruled 5-2 that not all threats are acts of terrorism.
Justice Maura Corrigan wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Chief Justice Clifford Taylor and Justices Michael Cavanagh and Stephen Markman. Corrigan said Osantowski didn't intend to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.
Justice Marilyn Kelly agreed with the result. Justices Elizabeth Weaver and Robert Young Jr. dissented.
Osantowski was sentenced to between 41/2 and 22 years in prison.
If prosecutors had won in the high court, his minimum sentence could have started at between nearly seven and 10 years and still gone up to 22 years.
Police arrested Osantowski after discovering the Internet messages. He had been corresponding with an Idaho girl who alerted her father, a Washington State University police officer, who in turn contacted Michigan authorities.
A search of Osantowski's Clinton Township home yielded weapons, ammunition, bomb-making paraphernalia, videotapes showing him in possession of assault weapons, a Nazi flag and printed materials about Adolf Hitler and white supremacy.
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