A federal appeals court in Manhattan has reversed the ISIS material support conviction of Akayed Ullah, the man who strapped a homemade pipe bomb to his body and detonated it in a packed New York City subway corridor during the December 2017 morning commute. The Second Circuit voted 2-1 on Tuesday to toss the single count, even as it left Ullah's remaining convictions intact, including for carrying out a terrorist attack on a mass transit system.
Ullah remains in prison serving a life sentence handed down in 2021. But the ruling strips away one of the government's most significant legal tools in a case that, until this week, stood as a textbook prosecution of a lone-wolf terrorist inspired by a foreign jihadist network.
The decision lands at a moment when federal prosecutors are already leaning on the material support statute in other active cases, and it raises hard questions about whether the courts are narrowing the law faster than Congress or the public realize.
On the morning of December 11, 2017, Ullah walked into the underground corridor connecting the Times Square and Port Authority stations and set off a homemade explosive device. He had built it as a suicide bomb. A construction flaw kept the device from fully detonating, likely preventing mass casualties in one of the busiest transit hubs in the country.
One bystander lost 70% of his hearing in the blast. Ullah survived.
At the hospital, Ullah told a detective he had acted on behalf of ISIS. Investigators later found an ISIS slogan written across his visa, his passport, and his bomb-making materials. He had watched the group's propaganda videos on YouTube. A jury convicted him, and he received a life sentence.
None of that, the confession, the slogan, the propaganda trail, the pipe bomb in a subway tunnel, was enough, in the majority's view, to sustain the material support charge.
Judge Myrna Pérez wrote the majority opinion. She acknowledged that ISIS drove Ullah's attack. But she found that online radicalization alone fell short of the statute's requirement that a defendant act under a foreign group's direction or control. In other words, watching ISIS videos and claiming allegiance to the group did not mean ISIS directed the bombing.
The distinction matters legally. The material support statute has been one of the federal government's most potent weapons against terrorism since the early 2000s. If a court rules that self-radicalized attackers who invoke a foreign terrorist organization still don't meet the bar for "direction or control," prosecutors lose a charge that carries heavy weight at sentencing and in public accountability.
Federal appeals courts have been at the center of a growing number of consequential reversals in recent months. In a separate case, an appeals court wiped out an $8.2 million defamation award against a Democratic PAC, underscoring how appellate panels can upend outcomes that seemed settled at the trial level.
Judge Steven Menashi, a Trump appointee, did not mince words. He pushed back in dissent, arguing the majority had distorted the material support statute and disregarded evidence the jury considered.
Menashi wrote bluntly: "That is wrong."
His argument was straightforward. The jury heard the evidence, the confession, the ISIS slogan on the passport, the propaganda videos, the bomb itself, and concluded that Ullah's actions constituted material support for a designated foreign terrorist organization. The majority, in Menashi's view, substituted its own reading of the statute for the jury's factual determination.
The split highlights a fault line that runs through the federal judiciary right now. Judges appointed by different presidents, operating under different judicial philosophies, are reaching sharply different conclusions about the scope of federal criminal statutes. The pattern has shown up in recent clashes over judicial authority in other high-profile cases as well.
Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told the New York Times that prosecutors "are going to be concerned that an important tool will be taken off the table."
That concern is not abstract. Two men were charged with material support to ISIS just weeks ago, in March, after allegedly attacking demonstrators outside Gracie Mansion. Prosecutors have not yet accused either defendant of contacting the group directly. If the Second Circuit's new standard holds, requiring proof of actual direction or control by a foreign organization, not just ideological alignment, those cases could face the same legal obstacle that just sank Ullah's material support count.
The ruling does not free Ullah. His life sentence rests on the remaining convictions, including for the terrorist attack on a mass transit system. But the practical effect extends well beyond one inmate's file. It redraws the line prosecutors must cross to charge someone with providing material support to a foreign terrorist group when the defendant acted alone, inspired by propaganda rather than directed by handlers.
Appellate courts across the country have been issuing decisions with broad downstream consequences. Just recently, a federal appeals court struck down a 158-year-old federal statute on constitutional grounds, a reminder that appellate panels are not shy about overturning longstanding legal frameworks when they believe the law demands it.
Consider the facts one more time. A man builds a pipe bomb. He straps it to his body. He walks into one of the most crowded transit corridors in America during rush hour. He detonates it. He tells police he did it for ISIS. Investigators find ISIS slogans on his passport and bomb supplies. A jury convicts him of material support.
And two appellate judges say that's not enough.
The majority's reasoning may be technically defensible under a narrow reading of the statute. Courts exist to interpret the law as written, not as the public might wish it read. But the practical message is corrosive: a self-declared ISIS operative who bombs a subway can have his material support conviction reversed because no one proved a handler in Raqqa sent him a text message first.
This is the kind of legal reasoning that erodes public confidence in the justice system. It is not that the judges acted in bad faith. It is that the gap between what happened in that subway tunnel and what the court says the law can reach is wide enough to drive a truck through, or, in this case, a pipe bomb.
The broader judicial landscape has grown increasingly contentious. At the Supreme Court level, disagreements over emergency appeals have exposed deep philosophical divisions about how aggressively courts should second-guess trial outcomes and statutory language.
The government could seek rehearing en banc before the full Second Circuit, or it could petition the Supreme Court. Neither path is guaranteed. For now, the 2-1 panel decision stands, and the material support statute is weaker in the Second Circuit than it was last week.
Congress could also act. If the statute's "direction or control" requirement is too narrow to cover lone-wolf attackers who openly pledge allegiance to foreign terrorist groups, lawmakers have the power to amend it. Whether they have the will is another question.
Meanwhile, the bystander who lost 70% of his hearing still lives with the consequences of what happened in that subway corridor. Ullah still sits in a federal prison. And federal prosecutors now know that in at least one major circuit, a bomber's own confession of acting for ISIS may not be enough to sustain a material support charge.
When the courts tell prosecutors they can't call an ISIS-inspired subway bombing "material support for ISIS," ordinary Americans are entitled to wonder whose side the law is on.
