ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A federal appeals court has vacated kidnapping convictions in a case involving the death of a 3-year-old boy who went missing from Georgia in 2017 and later turned up dead at a squalid compound in New Mexico.
The boy’s father and other family members were sentenced to life in prison in 2024 after jurors convicted them in what prosecutors described as a “sick end-of-times scheme.
“This instructional error was not harmless,” the panel wrote. It said the two men, who had represented themselves during the trial, had been excluded from bench conferences with the judge about notes jurors had sent during deliberations. A panel of the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a decision issued Tuesday that there was no evidence of a federal kidnapping crime when the family took the boy, noting that no court order or state law made it illegal for Siraj Ibn Wahhaj to take his son. The group already was living in New Mexico when a Georgia juvenile court issued a pickup order for the boy after his mother petitioned for emergency custody. The appellate panel took issue with jury instructions that implied the mother’s lack of consent could satisfy the unlawfulness element under the federal kidnapping statute. “Had the court correctly instructed on the law, the jury couldn’t have found unlawfulness based on the government’s evidence. The family members can’t be retried on the kidnapping charges, the panel ruled. The appeals panel also vacated convictions stemming from accusations that Wahhaj and his brother-in-law were preparing for attacks against the government.
In a complex case that took years to get to trial, jurors heard weeks of testimony from children who had lived with their parents at the compound, other family members, firearms experts, doctors and forensic technicians.
