A panel of the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has upheld the convictions of my old adversary, Lynne Stewart, for providing material support to terrorism — i.e., helping the Blind Sheikh run his Egyptian terrorist organization from U.S. prison, where he is serving a life-sentence. The convictions and sentences of the other two defendants were also affirmed. Lynne, who has been out on bail since being convicted eons ago, has been ordered to surrender to begin serving her sentence.

Yes, the sentence — that’s the interesting part. The court has sent Stewart’s case back to the trial judge for reconsideration of her absurdly short 28-month jail term (after the government asked for 30 years). The sentence has divided the appellate panel. All three judges agree that the sentence needs to be reconsidered. But two judges, Sack and Calabresi, seem to be narrowing the complaint down to whether Stewart committed perjury at her trial, which — if she is found by the sentencing judge to have done so — would call for a modest increase. In dissent, Judge Walker’s point is that a 28-month sentence for the terrorism-related offenses Stewart committed is a travesty whether or not she committed perjury.

In any event, she will be resentenced. For those interested in such things, I wrote about my mixed feelings about Lynne, here; and here’s the pre and post-mortems regarding the sentence.

By the way, since my topic in today’s column is Attorney General Holder’s sudden concern over delays in the military commission system, it’s worth pointing out that, for conduct that started around 1999, Stewart was indicted in 2002; her trial did not begin until mid-2004 and took about eight months; after that, they dawdled for over a year before finally imposing sentence in October 2006; now, a decade after the conduct, seven years after arrest, four years after trial, and three years after sentence – and mind you, she’s been free on bail since 2002 – the appeal has at long last been decided, and it has resulted in . . . a remand for further sentencing proceedings. And, after they someday occur, there will surely be another trip to the Second Circuit, and then an appeal to the Supreme Court. After that, the habeas corpus petitions start . . .