WASHINGTON (CP) - Canadian teen Travis Biehn faces sentencing Wednesday on two bomb-related charges in a case that sparked emotional debate about whether he's a dangerous kid who hates Americans or the victim of a tough anti-terror climate.

Biehn, 17, was convicted last month in a Pennsylvania juvenile court of threatening to blow up his school and gathering the material to do it.

He faces a range of penalties from probation, community service or counselling to jail until he's 21 years old. Prosecutors say Biehn is clearly a threat to public safety.

But defence lawyer Bill Goldman said he's confident two doctors who performed psychiatric evaluations on Biehn will recommend probation at the sentencing hearing in Doylestown.

Goldman filed a motion with the judge last week to have the convictions overturned and the teen's record cleared, arguing prosecutors didn't prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.

If that doesn't work, he said, the family will appeal to a higher court on the incendiary devices conviction, a felony that will dog Biehn for life.

"The facts just weren't there to support what's happened to him," said Goldman, who accuses District Attorney Diane Gibbons of publicly trying the youth before his trial and stirring nationalistic sentiment in a bid to get re-elected.

Biehn has been in custody in affluent Bucks County near Philadelphia since his arrest June 2, days after he reported a bomb threat had been scrawled on a school bathroom.

Police raided his home, finding several kilograms of potassium nitrate, tubing, fuses, lighter fluid and other items.

His family, originally from Newfoundland, says he and father Brant often used the materials to make harmless smoke bombs and fireworks for neighbourhood gatherings and burned a tree stump in the backyard to make way for a fish pond.

The arguments were discounted by Judge Kenneth Biehn, who is no relation, at a one-day trial where supporters were stunned when the boy was led away in shackles.

Others in the community said Biehn should get a hefty jail term and then be deported.

Gibbons, who noted that Biehn wore an "I am Canadian" T-shirt to his first court appearance, told reporters he was an angry kid who would rather be living in Canada.

"He's a pretty dangerous kid," Gibbons said after Biehn's conviction last month.

"He's obviously an unhappy kid and he's obviously an angry kid. What made him angry enough to do this, I don't know."

Sentencing, she said, would be up to the judge. Gibbons did not return phone calls this week.

"I'm nervous about the hearing," said the teen's mother, Annette. "The ball is still in the judge's court and he can sentence him to prison. It would just be horrific. The child is innocent."

She said she's furious that her son has waited more than a month for sentencing instead of the 20 days stipulated for incarcerated juveniles convicted of offences.

At Biehn's trial, prosecutors admitted no one saw him write the bomb threat. But when a search of his bedroom in suburban Buckingham yielded boxes of material, they said no other conclusion was plausible than the boy's intent to make a bomb.

Police witnesses and bomb experts said the teenager had most of the elements except a large quantity of something to ignite it.

But the magnetite thermite used to burn the stump in the Biehn's backyard couldn't have done the trick, said Goldman, who has marshalled chemistry professors to back him up.

Some family supporters blamed "hysteria" generated by the Columbine school killings and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for such strong public reaction in the case.

The Biehns moved to the United States in 1997, where Brant works as a marketing director for the giant pharmaceutical company Merck.