911 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui’s defense team saved the day despite the best efforts of their client: a jury has decided he should be spared the death penalty and given a life sentence for the bloodiest terrorist attack on the American homeland.
And, according to the Washington Post, he was gloatingly jubilant:
“America, you lost. I won!” Moussaoui yelled as he was escorted from the U.S. District courtroom in Alexandria after the verdict was read. He clapped his hands as he left.
The prosecution clearly didn’t share the joy:
Federal prosecutors had spent four years seeking Moussaoui’s execution and had the benefit of a defendant who many thought wanted to die. The verdict culminated one of the most contentious and convoluted prosecutions in recent history, a case that nearly derailed at numerous points but ended with the simplicity of a court clerk reading a verdict before a hushed courtroom.
As the verdict was announced, family members of Sept. 11 victims, who had long awaited this day, showed little visible reaction. Moussaoui rolled his eyes and looked glum.
What was behind the jury’s decision? The New York Times:
[Edward Adams, a court spokesman] said the jurors were unanimous on several factors that weighed against the defendant: that he wanted death or injury to result from terrorist acts, and that he showed a lack of remorse for his wrongdoing, for instance. But he said at least some jurors also embraced factors in his favor: that he had limited knowledge of the 9/11 plot, for example.
No juror believed that Mr. Moussaoui was psychotic, Mr. Adams said, despite efforts by defense lawyers to portray their client as sliding in and out of mental illness.
Although Mr. Moussaoui testified that he was proud to belong to Al Qaeda and took delight in the 9/11 attacks, his lawyers portrayed him as a bumbling terrorist hanger-on who could not even avoid detection weeks before the assaults were carried out. To execute him, the lawyers argued, would be to grant him a martyrdom he did not deserve.
One frequently mentioned concept in law enforcement now is “death by cop,” where someone tries to provoke the police into helping him/her committ suicide. Moussaoui seemed to be indulging in a game of death by jury.
“Show some courage,” the defense lawyer Gerald T. Zerkin told the jurors before they began to deliberate, adding that the trial “is more about us than it is about him.”
The bottom line, AFP reports, is that the jury just didn’t believe Moussaoui:
Dealing a painful defeat to the US government, they did not unanimously believe the Al-Qaeda plotter bore personal responsibility for nearly 3,000 deaths in the world’s deadliest terror strike.
Signs of a split in the 12 person jury which deliberate Moussaoui’s fate for 41 hours, can be detected in the thick 42-page verdict form which guided their deliberations.
Three jurors handwrote in an extra mitigating factor which surfaced in their deliberations to the verdict form — that “Moussaoui had limited knowledge of the 9/11 attack plans.”
US federal law states for the death penalty to be in play, jurors must, after weighing mitigating and aggravating factors, conclude unanimously that a defendant should die.
The form shows jurors did conclude that prosecutors had proved beyond a reasonable doubt Moussaoui came to the United States to kill as many Americans as possible in early 2001.
But their deliberations appear to have reached a crisis point over his exact role in September 11.
They could not answer a unanimous ‘Yes’ to the following question: “that the actions of defendant, Zacarias Moussaoui, result in the deaths of approximately 3,000 people?”
There are many ways this verdict is going to be perceived now, and the message that it’ll send. Some of these perspectives include:
- The jury didn’t give him his wish and make him a martyr.
- This jury probably wouldn’t have given death to any defendant because if there was a case that cried out for the death penalty, this is it.
- The verdict illustrates the strength of the jury system: that death by jury would not be permitted and just because 911 was a brutal, obscene event doesn’t mean jurors had to go along with a defendant whose claims about his role in it didn’t seem to pan out.
- The verdict underlines the weakness of the existing jury system because his overall role was clear and if he had acted differently perhaps some of the bloodshed could have been averted.
- It sends a message about American justice and its standards.
- It sends a message about how in the end American justice can be short-circuited by nimble lawyers.
Those are the justice issues. The other questions are going to center on the verdict’s impact in the political realm and in how the government approaches future prosecutions of terrorist defendants in the federal court system. Add to that the fact that this case also falls into the ongoing debate about the propriety and efficacy of the death penalty — and you have a decision that will be talked about for a long time to come.
UPDATE: Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, appearing on Hardball, expressed disappointment at the verdict. Some of what he said:
“I would have preferred to see the death penalty, but I kind of stand in awe of how our legal system works that it can come to a result like this,� Giuliani told “Hardball� minutes after the verdict was announced outside the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va. It has to say something about us to the rest of the world.�
“Yes, I’m disappointed. I believe that the death penalty was appropriate in this case, should have been applied,â€? he said. “But then at the same time — and maybe this is like the contradictory, complex feelings we all have about September 11 and everything that’s come from it. At the same time, I have tremendous respect for our legal system.â€?
BUT THAT’S JUST OUR VIEW. THE ISSUE IS RAGING NOW ON THE INTERNET. HERE’S A CROSS SECTION OF QUOTES. These are only EXCERPTS so please read the entire original posts as well:
—Wizbang: “So, Moussaoui dared the American people on that jury to kill him, and they blinked. What a travesty. And notice that the verdict was not unanimous, which means that a few jurors had their heads on straight. Additional thoughts: Islam is growing quickly in prisons all over this country as its followers prey on the anger inmates feel toward America. I don’t like the idea that Moussaoui will have access to more potential terror converts.”
Frankly, I have no brief for Mr. Moussaoui who has, I believe sincerely, told us that he hates us and regrets that more of my fellow New Yorkers weren’t killed on that horrible morning in September of 2001 across the street from where I sat, watching. But the rule of law is far more important, and the Government that has been side-stepping the rule of law in its treatment of purported unlawful combatants of its own determination in derogation of all principles of our Constitution, statutes and treaty obligations, be they citizens, legal residents or foreigners, whether apprehended here or anywhere else… so when, in the one criminal case supposedly related to the 9-11 events themselves is brought, and the Government still manages to take as many shortcuts with the law that its prosecutors think they can get away with… Let’s just say it’s gratifying to see a judge and jury do their job the way the law actually intended.
— Rusty Shackleford has lots of links to other sites and writes:
This is a travesty of justice….Fuzzy logic alert from friends and readers. So, you’re happy that Moussaoui got life in prison because killing him would have made him a martyr? That does make a kind of superficial sense, but think about it. By that logic, no jihadi should ever be killed!…He won’t be kept in GP–general population–so unfortunately there won’t be enough time for him to become someone’s “bitch” or get a shiv in him. Instead, he’ll have a private jail cell for the next 30 years, where he’ll have a Koran delivered to him by a prison guard with white gloves every morning, he’ll be given a prayer mat, and he’ll have an imam come visit him once a week to discuss his misunderstanding of the word “jihad” in the Koran.
However, I think this ruling makes everyone happy, something that would seem to be extremely hard. Zacarias Moussaoui avoids becoming a martyr for his cause, something that would have become a powerful and damaging myth for the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. It denies the wishes of Moussaoui, which is not an entirely unwelcome notion. It also gives the families of the victims of September Eleventh some comfort, since although it’s not the harshest penalty the court could have given, it’s still a daunting sentence, my own feelings about the death penalty aside. This case seems to have come to a happy end for the prosecution, who were scolded by the judge earlier in the proceedings for sloppy conduct. They get their conviction despite their actions, something that will make people forget about their misconduct.
—Mister Americano: “It’s too late for the United States to backtrack on its decision to try Moussauoi as an ordinary criminal. So Moussaoui will go to federal prison for the rest of his life, however long or short that might be. He’ll be serving his time alongside Americans. Perhaps one of them will do what America couldn’t bring itself to do and deal with Moussauoi as the enemy soldier he considers himself to be.”
You kill this guy, he becomes a poster child for terrorist. Put him in jail for the rest of his life, and he has time to think… A LONG time, about what he did… Don’t allow him to publish any books, write letters or have any contact with the outside world. Based on his age and apparent health, he will probably live another 50 years, all of it behind bars, surrounded by people who hate him… (This guy would not last 5 minutes in the General Population…) So I suspect this is the perfect punishment for him.
—Jihad Watch: “Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh will now be at the forefront of the noble task of raising up in prison a new generation of mujahedin to carry on their jihad against the Great Satan.”
—Tammy Bruce: “After almost 5 years of work, millions of dollars spent, and thousands of man hours working to do one thing–get Moussaoui the death penalty, it didn’t work. Is it the incompetence of federal prosecutors, a dense jury? Or, as some are arguing , was this case overcharged from the beginning?”
His greatest dream was to die a martyr, so he just made up stuff on the stand. The jury robbed him of his wish, even though they claimed they couldn’t have cared less about denying him death and 20 virgins. It wasn’t part of their deliberations, which fell short of a unanimous verdict on the death penalty. In fact, Moussaoui was a bit whacked. The jury decided that his childhood made him that way, so he got life. Our Oprah society wouldn’t allow anything more. Too bad, but he’ll live a life like death in prison. It’s just that he’ll be fully present to feel it. Good riddance to this al Qaeda madman. As an aside, I’m completely inconsistent when it comes to the death penalty and al Qaeda. I’m against it for everyone else, but for it for people who want to rip our lives from us. When it comes to terrorists, it’s just too much to ask that I be rational.
The jury was unable to unanimously agree that this soulless jackass should die, so he gets to live. Normally when some subhuman excrement, like a child rapist or a Muslim terrorist, escapes the hangman’s noose, “Old Sparky,� the firing squad, or a lethal injection, I get all incensed, righteously indignant, and just plain ticked off. But in Moussaoui’s case, I’m going to make an exception, because letting him live—making him live—deprives him of the one thing he gives a damn about: Martyrdom. He was willing to risk his life to become a hero in the afterlife with 72 virgins. Close, but no cigar, Zacarias. You lose.
–A batch of reactions also at Pajamas Media.
—Crooked Timber: “Seems like the right decision to me. Opportunist that he is, Moussaoui shouted “America, You Lost!â€? when being led from the courtroom, which is meaningless but may have its intended effect on those who wanted to see him executed. I’m sure he had an equally snappy alternative ready—perhaps something about martyrdom, or maybe just the same line, come to think of it—in case the decision had gone the other way.”
The civilian courts were always a poor venue for the case. It’s likely that jurors voting for death allowed their emotions to over rule their logic and the law. Given the state of our justice system, I find it hard to believe anyone would be sentenced to death if they weren’t one-hundred percent, directly linked to a specific crime. Had Moussaoui, as one of the hijackers, surived a place crash which took lives, he’d probably have gotten death. But even then it wouldn’t have been certain. Still, it may have been the only way.
—Roger Ailes: “Watch the wingnutosphere for demands for jury reform, eludications of the President’s Constitutional power to summarily execute criminal defendants regardless of judicial advisory opinions, Palovian droolings of the word dhimmitude and the home addresses and phone numbers of the jurors.”
Forty years from now, Moussaoui will die in this supermax facility of old age, and newspapers will have to explain to half of their readership exactly who this man was. Human rights groups will have no interest in him, and while a few lunatic terrorists will salute him in the near term, they will quickly move their focus to other martyrs and more intelligent and dangerous leaders. Hollywood celebrities will not hold benefits for his defense. Publishers of childrens’ books will not offer him book deals. Candles will not be lit for his benefit. He gets to live in a cage for decades, and die almost anonymously and unremarkably. It’s hard to argue with that sentence, in the long run.
Fresh on the heels of United 93’s debut on the silver screen, a movie that serves up the reminder so badly needed by this country (and the western world) that there are those out there who will go to any extreme to kill us, the verdict tends to remind us instead that we’re not taking the war on terror seriously at all. And, more ominously, it underscores the obvious ideological divide that is emboldening Moussaoui’s fellow jihadists. America has lost this battle. And we’ll lose more of these until blood is shed once again on American soil. Unless we wake up.
—The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler:
A big “thank you� to the 12 knuckle-dragging bleeding hearts who just proved to us that it is possible to have absolutely no brains, to be the result of parents raising the placenta instead of the child, and still grow up to sit on a jury and mock justice through your complete absence of morality and sense of proportion.
All over the nation, retards rejoice and single-celled organisms sing out in unison as you prove that they, too, can one day grow up to decide the outcome of a mass murder case. All over the world, terrorists let out a sigh of relief, knowing that you can go to America, conspire to murder 3,000 innocent civilians, and still live out your days in greater comfort and luxury than their caves could ever afford them.
–Momary writing in Daily Kos: “It seems to me that a very obvious message here is that the Moussaoui verdict represents a very real defeat in the Global War on Terror (TM). I think those on the left should be pointing this up as another glaring example of the incompetence of the Bush administration. After all, if they can’t even get Moussaoui when he is in jail here in the United States, how can they possibly be trusted to keep America safe?”
—Straight Talk: “I’m putting my faith in the prison system of our country and what will happen will happen.”
—Confederate Yankee: “At the same time, life is prison, even in what is likely to be solitary confinement, is perhaps more likely to result in his dying within this next decade. Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibalistic serial killer of 17 men, was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences in February of 2002, but was murdered by another inmate in 2004. Child molester John Geoghan was also sentenced to life in 2002 and murdered by another inmate two years later. It is quite possible that Moussaoui will create enough hatred among the inmate population that his life sentence will end up being a very short stay.”
Al Qaeda abandoned him years ago, he doesn’t even have them any more. And any hope of martyrdom went down the drain with the life verdict. He will become a footnote in the history of 9/11.
One more thought. This is not a victory for America. Moussaoui had no role in 9/11. Cheering on al Qaeda and hoping they succeed — and celebrating when they did — does not make one a co-conspirator.The scorecard remains: Al Qaeda: 3,000 killed on 9/11. Number of responsible persons brought to justice: None. Where is Osame? Bush still can’t find him.
—QandO:”In the end the jurors couldn’t find unanimous ground on which to base a punishment of death. Moussaoui was already in jail on 9/11. Tough call, but in this case, probably the right call.”
—Steven Taylor:
One of the things that has troubled me to some degree about this case is that I often got the feeling that because Moussaoui was all we had in terms of someone to prosecute for 911, then perhaps more had been vested in him specifically than may have been warranted by the evidence.
Still, if they found him guilty of the charges, that means they accepted the notion that he knew. If he knew, then it would seem to me that his childhood is irrelevant and issues of doubt about his exact guilt should have already been settled.
—Peter C. Glover asks what this says about the value of life:”So Zacarias Moussaoui is to escape the death penalty. Not good. A man who, by his own admission, was pleased to take part in one of the greatest terrorist mass murders in history will be kept for life at the taxpayers expense. If we cannot put those so richly deserving of the death sentence to death as a society then I agree with the liberals – by what right can we put anyone to death?”
—Thomas Joscelyn:”So, while the jurors may have been right that Moussaoui only had limited knowledge of the plot – the same could probably be argued for other participants, including the so-called “muscle hijackers,â€? by the way – they were wrong to suspect that he wasn’t involved at all. All of this suggests that the jurors should not have “addedâ€? their own mitigating factor in deciding whether or not to sentence Moussaoui to death.”
—Irish Pennants:”Let me make myself clear. The world would in no way be diminished were Zacarias Moussaoui not in it. And the desire among Americans to execute someone for the 9-11 atrocity was understandable. But Moussaoui appeared to be more psycho than actively criminal. The exciters of public opinion wanted to emphasize the criminal, in which case, we could have stuck a lethal needle into his arm. That’s what Moussaoui wanted. He wanted to be immortalized as one of the devious masterminds behind the 9-11 attacks. The worst punishment we could have rendered was to declare Moussaoui a head case. Throw him in a dungeon, and lose the key. He is now on his way.”
—Liberally Conservative:”Some would have preferred the death penalty including Moussaoui who is in his thirties. He could spend 40 or more years at the Colorado Supermax prison. Moussaoui is unrepentent, arrogant and defiant. His attitude may change once he finds himself out of the limelight and in solitary confinement.”
—Delaware Watch:”From an objective point of view I can think of no compelling reason why governments should engage in the business of killing people they have under guard in detained facilities. It is not a circumstance of self-defense. My objection to the death penalty notwithstanding, I believe there are many good specific reasons why giving Moussaoui the death penalty was a bad idea.” (Click on the link to find out what they are)
—Rain Crow Calling:”It’s sad to see the professional 9/11 mourners continue to show up in the news as if they had some special endowment of wisdom or perspective in the trial of Z. Moussaoui.
The jury didn’t see any evidence to support the fanciful prosecution position that this sad sack was a mastermind of the attacks, or even had any real knowledge of what was going on before it happened.”
–Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit:”PEGGY NOONAN thinks that Moussaoui should have gotten death….[He gives you the quote]..I confess that I’m more interested in seeing the deaths of people who are still in a position to harm us, but she nonethless makes a good point.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.