Supreme Court will not hear Ramic’s terror appeal
Published 7:13 pm Thursday, October 8, 2026
A Bowling Green man convicted of federal terror-related crimes stemming from his membership in ISIS awaits resentencing after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case.
Mirsad Ramic, 36, was sentenced last year to 101 months in prison after a jury in U.S. District Court found him guilty of providing material support and resources to ISIS, conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and receiving military-type training from a designated terrorist organization.
Ramic’s legal team and federal prosecutors each appealed the 101-month sentence, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit issuing a ruling earlier this year that the time Ramic received for his crimes was “shockingly low” and directing that he be resentenced by the federal district court.
In August, attorneys for Ramic appealed that decision, petitioning the Supreme Court, which began its current term Monday, to hear the case.
In a decision filed Tuesday, the high court denied the petition from Ramic’s defense team, which means that the appeals court’s ruling ordering Ramic to be resentenced stands.
At Ramic’s trial, jurors were shown evidence that he and two other people left Bowling Green in 2014 and traveled to Syria to join ISIS, which is designated by the U.S. Department of State as a foreign terrorist organization.
Email newsletter signup
According to witnesses, Ramic enlisted as a fighter, trained with weapons and took part in an offensive against Kurdish militants during the siege of the Syrian city of Kobani in 2014-15, an operation that resulted in thousands of deaths and displaced thousands more.
Ramic at some point left ISIS and went to Turkey in 2015, where he was arrested and imprisoned for terror-related crimes there.
An American grand jury meeting in 2021 charged Ramic with the offenses for which he was tried in Bowling Green.
After his conviction, the U.S. Attorney’s Office called for a life sentence for Ramic, arguing that his crimes were sufficiently serious to merit that punishment.
Ramic’s defense team, headed on the trial level by federal public defender Scott Wendelsdorf, asked for Ramic to be sentenced to time served, and subsequent appeals featured arguments that a terror enhancement increasing the amount of time Ramic would be imprisoned was improperly applied when evidence showed that Ramic’s actions were taken against either non-state actors or a Syrian regime that was not recognized by the U.S. as that nation’s government.
U.S. District Court Judge Greg Stivers decided on a 101-month sentence, arriving at that calculation through comparing Ramic’s case to other defendants with similar criminal charges and arriving at a median sentence of 168 months.
Stivers subtracted 67 months to account for the amount of time Ramic spent imprisoned in Turkey.
In overturning the sentence, the federal appeals court said that the 101-month term “minimized” Ramic’s conduct and noted that Ramic had not disavowed or shown remorse for his actions, so the case merited a greater punishment in order to protect the public.
No date has been set for Ramic’s resentencing.
