March 29 TEXAS: Guilty plea expected today in '99 Atascosa cop ambush 7 years after a 911 call lured a trickle of law-enforcement officers into an ambush, the man accused of helping plot the slaughter that killed 3 and wounded 2 said Tuesday he'd plead guilty Wednesday to murder. Kenneth Vodochodsky's plea, scheduled to be entered in Karnes County this morning, would settle the last dispute from the Atascosa County tragedy, often described as one of the worst massacres of law officers in Texas history. The deal also would close the case just as abruptly as it was reopened 2 years earlier when the state's highest criminal court declared that there wasn't enough evidence to convict Vodochodsky and condemn him to death. A rematch was scheduled for May, but this time prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty. The 25-year-old defendant would have rather risked death. "I sure don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison," Vodochodsky said in Atascosa County Jail. "At least this way, I wouldn't." Now, freedom might not be far off for Vodochodsky, assuming State District Judge Stella Saxon approves the deal. The plea bargain calls for a 30-year sentence but opens the door to possible parole after 15 years. With credit for time served, Vodochodsky already is almost halfway to the point where he becomes eligible for release. Vodochodsky's prosecution was especially emotionally charged and unusual, even for a capital murder case. Two elements provided the extra heat: the viciousness of the crime and the relatively slim evidence of Vodochodsky's participation. When the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals tossed out his death sentence in 2004, it found the evidence merely showed Vodochodsky had "the bad luck of being the friend and roommate of a man determined to kill police officers and himself." That man was Jeremiah Engleton, whose life, by various accounts, was spiraling downward when he was arrested for attacking his wife on Oct. 11, 1999. The next day, Engleton returned home and dialed 911. Hiding in the dusk and armed with several weapons, he shot the officers as they arrived, killing Atascosa County sheriff's Deputies Thomas Monse Jr. and Mark Stephenson and Texas State Trooper Terry Miller. Engleton wounded 2 others before turning a gun on himself as additional officers closed in. With Engleton dead, Vodochodsky soon emerged as a suspected accomplice. Not only had he bailed Engleton out of jail, the 2 firearms enthusiasts had then visited a gun store where Engleton stocked up on ammunition. Furthermore, Vodochodsky left their mobile home only after Engleton placed the 911 call. Additional pieces of circumstantial evidence and testimony convinced jurors at the 2001 trial that Vodochodsky not only helped Engleton prepare, but also lingered long enough to help shoot the first 2 officers to arrive. When the verdict was overturned, it was the 1st time that the court threw out a death penalty conviction for lack of evidence. But as the months passed, investigators found new witnesses. Each potentially added to the pile of circumstantial evidence. In the end, Vodochodsky said a plea looked like the safest way out. In April, a clerk at the Pleasanton Texas Stop-N-Go told investigators in a sworn statement that she had seen Vodochodsky stop to put gas in a motorcycle the night of the shooting. No motorcycle had been mentioned at the first trial, and Vodochodsky says he doesn't even know how to ride one. But the clerk's testimony could have helped prosecutors explain why no witnesses saw his car at the scene of the shooting. In June, a 50-year-old man gave investigators another sworn statement. He said that hours before the shooting he met Engleton and Vodochodsky at a convenience store. Vodochodsky was silent, but Engleton said they were going to ambush some pigs that kept coming onto his property. Engleton even invited the man to join in the shooting, according to the affidavit. Vodochodsky said that while both stories were false, they showed the investigators' determination. "They know these people are lying yet they're using them anyway," he said. "They're going to do whatever they can to keep me locked up." The final straw came with a 3rd witness, one of Engleton's former classmates. She said Engleton told her he was planning with his best friend to target some Atascosa County officers who were hassling him. Vodochodsky saw the woman's statement on Friday for the 1st time. There's no way her story could be true, he said, but on Monday, he signed the plea agreement. Ren Pea, the district attorney for the region that includes Atascosa and Karnes counties, didn't return calls for comment. Vodochodsky's attorney Alan Futrell described the plea as the best possible ending. "It's a good agreement because neither side is happy," he said. "Neither side can say, 'We won.'" For Vodochodsky, even his unprecedented victory at the appellate court seems relatively hollow in hindsight. Once his death sentence was overturned, and the district attorney decided not to seek another one, the case drained of urgency. Without a lethal injection hanging over his head, he feared that activists, reporters and appellate judges would turn their attention to death penalty cases. And he'd be left with a long life behind bars. "If the death penalty were still on the table," Vodochodsky said, "I'd probably still go to trial." (source: San Antonio Express-News) USA: Doctors and Executions It may turn out, surprisingly, that the medical profession holds the key to ending this country's longstanding and dishonorable link to other nations that continue to shackle and kill some offenders. Capital punishment is horrifying and ineffective, and it's also beneath the international stature of the United States. Do we want to be at the same moral latitude as Libya, Iran and Iraq? Only 2 fully democratic and developed countries in the world -- the United States and Japan -- still employ capital punishment.And executions are distasteful in any number of ways, even to those who carry them out. A recent New York Times article covered the emotional damage done to those who participate and the importance of "moral disengagement" for them. The prison system tries mightily to remove individual culpability from correction officers who handle the killing, but it's to no ultimate success. Here's what that means: each aspect of an execution is handled by different people. Does the correctional officer who straps down the condemned man's left arm actually kill him? What about the officer who shackles his feet for the walk to the gurney? Or the one who puts the needles in his veins, or the ones who actually depress the syringes? Which of these men actually kills the prisoner? Exactly -- it's impossible to say. It also allows these participants in the deaths to rationalize away their roles: "Hey, I only bought the chemicals; I didn't kill him." In a cockeyed way, this makes sense in our system, in which "the people" convict and then carry out the execution. If no one person can be pinned down, then all of us are the executioners. Well, I say, that's not acceptable -- I want no killing done in my name. This is a system that allows the participants, from the correction officer to the governor, to hide behind the procedure and disclaim the fact of having executed the prisoner. If capital punishment is good for our country, then why sanitize it to the extent it has been? If Gov. Mike Easley really believes in this, let him hand a loaded firearm to a lone shooter, who would put a bullet into the back of the neck of a bound, kneeling man. That's the way China has done it, and it was done in public, too. At least that system has the appearance of deterring other capital crimes. And there would be no question of what the prisoner was going through, unlike the issues recently raised by the use of the lethal injection. With cruder forms of execution -- gassing, shooting, electrocuting -- there is little question of the mechanism and cause of death. But lethal injection has raised some troubling issues, particularly on the question of whether the condemned is suffering pain during the course of dying. This is where the physicians might help spell the end of capital punishment. In North Carolina, state law requires executions to be attended by doctors, who certify the death. But in doing so, they violate ethical guidelines of the profession. In California, an execution was actually called off because the prison system could not come up with any physicians -- anesthesiologists in this case -- to monitor the death of Michael Morales. The problem is whether the amounts and sequence of chemicals render the prisoner truly senseless, so that he does not suffer severe pain during the actual process of dying. Autopsies have found that in a number of cases, the amounts of chemicals in the body were not sufficient to induce this degree of unconsciousness and the prisoner, while motionless, would be in great pain. If the prison system were genuinely concerned with administering a painless death -- the goal, after all, of lethal injection -- there is a way to achieve it. A "bispectral index" monitor can be used to assess, by analyzing an electroencephalogram, the depth of unconsciousness. Increasingly common in surgery, the bispectral index could guide the administration of the fatal chemicals to ensure that enough are used. Of course the correctional system knows these monitors exist -- their use was approved in 1996 -- but they do not employ them. And why not? I suspect their use would begin to bridge in a perverse and uncomfortable way the distance between the operating room and the death chamber and, in turn, the gap between physician and executioner. Doctors in California were absolutely right to refuse to participate, and the same is true for doctors in North Carolina. They must work to increase -- not shrink -- the gulf between them and capital punishment. With physicians' refusals to have anything to do with executions, the death penalty will become harder to carry out. But more than that, those refusals will call further attention to the future of capital punishment and encourage all the states, and the United States, to join the majority of countries worldwide that ban execution as a means of punishment. (source: Point of View; Bob Kochersberger, who teaches journalism at N.C. State University; News & Observer, March 28) ******************** Victims of death penalty 'closure' The past few weeks have been rife with the prospect of closure denied. The families of Slobodan Milosevic's tens of thousands of victims were ostensibly denied closure when he died before the conclusion of his war crimes tribunal. The decision over where to try exiled Liberian ruler Charles Taylor turns largely on how to afford closure to his victims. And the families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks despaired that government misconduct had ended not only the prosecution, but also their one chance at closure. "I felt like my heart had been ripped out," said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died in the attack on the Pentagon. "I felt like my husband had been killed again." The death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui has been touted by the government as a way to bring resolution to bereft families. Hundreds watch the proceedings on remote, closed-circuit televisions. Dozens will testify about their losses. This will be their "day in court." Since as far back as 2002, when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced he'd seek the death penalty for Moussaoui to "carry out justice," it's been assumed that this outcome would bring closure. Just as, in 2001, when Ashcroft decided that family members of the Oklahoma City bombing victims could witness the execution of Timothy McVeigh on closed-circuit television, he said it would "meet their need for closure." Why? What's the empirical basis for the government assumption that all, or even most, victims of terrible tragedy will find "closure" through protracted trials and executions? To the extent the data on the needs of victims suggests anything at all, it says there is no magical solution, no one-size-fits-all mechanism to afford closure to the victims and survivors of violent crime. That makes the Justice Department's message that healing requires victim participation in the Moussaoui trial and an eventual execution for the offender even more disturbing; it offers the illusion of government-approved "closure" to thousands of people who desperately seek it, but may not ever find it here. In a seminal 1985 law review article, law professor Lynne Henderson examined the relationship between victims' rights and criminal justice policy. Looking carefully at the psychological data on the needs of victims, Henderson discovered a wide array of responses to tragedy -- responses that differ widely from victim to victim, and that change significantly over a victim's lifetime. More crucially, Henderson's research reveals "common assumptions about crime victims -- that they are all 'outraged' and want revenge and tougher law enforcement -- underlie much of the current victim's rights rhetoric. But in light of the existing psychological evidence, these assumptions fail to address the experience and real needs of past victims." Criminal trials and the promise of an execution offer a seemingly appealing tool for assigning blame and channeling rage. But many crime victims have reported that the endless repetition of their tragic stories, the formal legal rules, and the years and years between appeals only serve to increase stress and delay healing. This isn't to say that many victims of 9/11 don't want to see Moussaoui executed. As the mother of one victim told ABC News, "I was looking to this trial to see if we could eradicate one evil person, to remove one force of evil from this beautiful world." It is to say that in promoting the notion that only a death penalty can afford closure, the prosecution is disregarding the wants and needs of many others. This is not the 1st time we have seen this phenomenon: The survivors of the Oklahoma City bombings who didn't want to see McVeigh executed were not permitted to offer victim impact statements. As Bruce Shapiro pointed out in a 1997 essay in Salon, the terror trial that made "victim closure" a national buzzword was structured such that "any victim or relative who wanted to play a part in the sentencing phase of the trial first had to pass a death-penalty loyalty test." Many, many victims of violent tragedy object to this assumption that their interest in justice is congruent with that of state prosecutors seeking the death penalty. Just last month, Vicki Schieber, the mother of Shannon Schieber, a Wharton Business School student murdered in 1998 by a serial rapist, testified before the U.S. Senate's subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and property rights. As she told the committee: "The word closure is invoked so frequently in discussions of victims and the death penalty that victims' family members jokingly refer to it as 'the c word.' But I can tell you with all seriousness that there is no such thing as closure when a violent crime rips away the life of someone dear to you." Schieber testified that a single-minded government focus on executions shifts the focus away from other, more meaningful legal reforms that might better honor victims and support their families. This jibes with Henderson's empirical data, which suggests that more than anything -- maybe even executions -- the families of tragedy victims ultimately need answers. They need to know "why." Perhaps it's no accident, then, that so many of the 9/11 families who are avidly following the Moussaoui trial say they are not doing so in the hopes of a death sentence. Some don't want to give Moussaoui the martyr status he craves. Many others just seem to be looking for answers. As Blake Allison, whose wife was killed, told the Washington Post: "I felt the government wasn't telling us all that it knew." Fiona Havlish, who lost her husband, echoed that: "I think what all of us are looking for is the truth, and the truth has not been forthcoming out of Washington." And if Henderson's data are right, and what most 9/11 victims need is answers, you have to wonder whether the government is in fact victimizing them twice with this crazy trial. Not only is the Bush administration still withholding vital information that might afford them comfort. It's also proving that government incompetence, bureaucracy and willful blindness were as much the reason "why" as Zacarias Moussaoui. (source: Opinion, Dahlia Lithwick, who covers legal affairs for Slate; Her opinion appeared in the Washington Post) CALIFORNIA: Slaying may land 'Nut Case' killer on death row ---- Even defense admits shooting of coach was worst of crimes A jury convicted Demarcus Ralls last week of 4 murders in Oakland's "Nut Case" crime spree, but prosecutors are banking on a 5th killing that was never mentioned during Ralls' trial to help put him on death row. An Alameda County prosecutor used the unusual tactic of telling jurors about the killing of Joseph "Doc" Mabrey, who was slain shortly before Ralls turned 18, during his opening statements Tuesday in the death penalty phase of Ralls' murder trial. "There is yet more blood on the defendant's hands," said Assistant District Attorney Darryl Stallworth. Ralls is the first of 6 members of the Nut Cases gang to be tried in a crime spree that included 5 killings and 23 robberies during a 10-week period that ended with their arrests in January 2003. The remaining defendants, including 2 of Ralls' half-brothers and a cousin, are expected to go on trial later this year. Jurors last week convicted Ralls, 21, of four of those murders and more than a dozen robberies and attempted robberies. All of those crimes were committed after he turned 18. Although Ralls was indicted in the Mabrey killing, prosecutors decided to try that case separately because Ralls was 17 at the time and, under state law, would not be eligible for the death penalty. But prosecutors can cite such offenses -- even if they've never been proved in a trial -- when asking a jury to sentence a defendant to death. That is what Stallworth did Tuesday when he told jurors that Ralls and his fellow gang members carefully planned the killing of the popular 36-year-old youth sports coach on Oct. 24, 2002. Even Ralls' lawyer, who argued that her client was the victim of a disadvantaged childhood and should be sentenced to life in prison without parole, conceded to jurors that the Mabrey killing was the worst crime committed by the defendant. But defense lawyer Deborah Levy insisted, "He is not the monster you have heard about. ... There is value to him." Mabrey was separated from his wife and dating Aminah "Nay-Nay" Dorsey-Colbert, who was married to Ralls' half-brother Greg Colbert. When Greg Colbert was paroled in October 2002, Stallworth said, he ordered his wife and Ralls to kill Mabrey. Stallworth said Dorsey-Colbert used a ruse to lure Mabrey to his death. "She called and said she had been beaten by Greg and that she needed help," the prosecutor said. She introduced Ralls as her younger brother and asked Mabrey to give him a ride home, the prosecutor said. Ralls directed Mabrey to the 3200 block of Storer Avenue, where Ralls shot Mabrey in the head, Stallworth said. Mabrey "was only trying to help Aminah Dorsey-Colbert," Stallworth told the jury as he displayed a smiling photo of the coach. "He paid for that call for help with a bullet to his head." Ralls, dressed in white shirt and dark pants, stared at the witness table, often with his hands over his head, during much of the proceedings. The jury is expected to hear a tape of his confession to police in the Mabrey case this week. Levy made no effort to excuse or justify Ralls' role in the killings but argued that the jury did not know the real Demarcus Ralls. After beginning her presentation by playing the Billy Joel song "And So It Goes" -- which features the lyrics, "Every time I've held a rose, it seems I only felt the thorns" -- Levy said the song defined her client's life. She described how Ralls was born to an imprisoned, drug-addicted mother and then bounced among his parents and several foster homes, never knowing a stable home. "Mr. Ralls was desperately seeking a place to belong," she said. "If allowed to live out his life in prison ... he can be of use to his family." She said Ralls looked up to Colbert, and was drawn into the bloody crime spree after killing Mabrey. Levy said Ralls had no criminal convictions before the Mabrey killing. "Once you kill someone, it changes you for life," Levy said. (source: San Francisco Chronicle) VIRGINIA: Moussaoui death penalty trial races towards a climax The death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui is racing towards a climax, after a stunning day of testimony in which the Al Qaeda operative said Osama bin Laden ordered him to fly a 5th hijacked jet at the White House on September 11, 2001. Moussaoui testified on Monday that British "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid was to join him in the hijacking, and said he had lied about his involvement while in jail in August 2001, to allow the attacks to go ahead - confirming the central plank of the prosecution's case for his execution. Defence lawyer Gerald Zerkin asked Moussaoui: "Before your arrest, were you scheduled to be a pilot in the operation on September 11?" "Yes," said Moussaoui. "I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House," Moussaoui added in his 1st public claim that he was part of the same plot as the other 19 hijackers which killed nearly 3,000 people. Jurors watched transfixed as Moussaoui delivered his bombshell, as Zerkin asked who told him to fly a plane into the presidential mansion. "Osama bin Laden," the Frenchman replied calmly, in an appearance sharply at odds with his ranting performances at previous hearings. Defence lawyers claim Moussaoui knew nothing of the 9/11 plot, and was a regarded as a nuisance by the "real terrorists" in Al Qaeda. Asked if he had lied to investigators Moussaoui replied: "Yes, you could say that." "The reason you told lies was so you could allow the operation to go forward," Prosecutor Robert Spencer demanded, underlying the surreal nature of the proceeding by referring to him as "Mr Moussaoui" as if he was just any other witness. "That is correct," Moussaoui replied.MO< "The reason you wanted to fly a plane into the White House was because you wanted to kill Americans?" Spencer asked. "That is correct," Moussaoui said, after declaring that all Americans were his enemy. Moussaoui's testimony came after Judge Leonie Brinkema told the jury, who must decide whether Moussaoui caused the deaths of any of the September 11 victims, and so should be executed, they may have the case by the end of the week. "There is a possibility, given the rate at which the trial is moving, that you might have this case for deliberation by Friday," she said. In later testimony, the court heard that the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohamed denied Moussaoui was ever to be part of the September 11 plot. Sheikh Mohamed said the Frenchman, the only person charged in connection with September 11 in the United States, was in training for a "2nd wave" of attacks that was put on the "backburner", according to testimony from a US interrogation of the Al Qaeda planner who is now in secret custody. "Sheikh Mohamed said he intended Moussaoui to participate in a follow-on attack in the United States," said the testimony. Moussaoui had demanded the right to testify in the case for four years, but his court-appointed defence team tried to get the judge to bar him, minutes before he stepped to the stand. They argued that since Moussaoui did not recognise US justice, his oath to tell the truth would be meaningless. But Brinkema said he had an absolute right under US justice to testify - and was competent to do so. Early in his riveting testimony, Moussaoui told how Reid was to be part of his team targeting the White House. Reid was not in the United States on September 11. He was detained on an American Airlines Paris-Miami flight on December 22, 2001 after he tried to detonate a shoe bomb. He is now serving a life prison term. Moussaoui said he did not know the exact date of the attacks. "I knew that it was planned for after August because I had to finish my training. I knew the operation was to take place at the end of the summer. I didn't have a specific date." Moussaoui said he also did not know all of the targets, only that they included the World Trade Center and the White House. Asked if he was proud to be part of the plot, Moussaoui told the court: "I am grateful." 2 hijacked planes hit and destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York killing 2,749 people. A 3rd ploughed into the Defence Department headquarters in Washington, killing 125 people, and 4th crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after a passenger uprising. About 100 people were killed there. (source: Agence France Presse) **************** FBI Agent Says Moussaoui Was Looking to Make a Deal In testimony, he details a secret negotiation at a Virginia jail. He says the terrorist offered to help prosecutors in order to avoid the death penalty. In another twist to an already bizarre case, the last witness in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial Tuesday described a secret, late-night jailhouse meeting in February where he said Moussaoui tried to strike a deal with prosecutors to cooperate with the government in order to save his life. FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald, one of the lead agents in the case, said Moussaoui summoned him and federal prosecutors to the Alexandria city jail in an attempt to persuade them that he was worth more to them alive than dead. But the bargaining in the jail law library on Feb. 6, a month before Moussaoui's trial began, broke down when prosecutors demanded that Moussaoui provide "full and complete" cooperation and tell everything he knew about Al Qaeda, not just his role in the Sept. 11 conspiracy. Fitzgerald testified that Moussaoui came away from the clandestine meeting empty-handed. Though Moussaoui's lawyers have said he wants to die a martyr, he told the FBI and prosecutors that death in a prison execution chamber was not a fitting end for an avowed terrorist such as himself. "He stated it was different to die in battle like an F-16 pilot," Fitzgerald said, "than to die in jail like in a toilet." Fitzgerald was the concluding witness in a trial full of surprises. A government aviation lawyer was accused of improperly tampering with witnesses, prompting the judge to exclude all but one aviation expert from testifying and nearly gutting the government's case. Then Moussaoui returned the favor: Taking the stand in his own defense, he said he was supposed to fly a fifth plane into the White House on Sept. 11, and admitted the government's chief allegation - that he had lied to the FBI after his arrest in August 2001 so the terrorist plot could go forward. Today, lawyers for both sides are to make closing arguments. Jurors will then begin deliberations. Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April. The jury's first task in the sentencing phase is to decide if prosecutors proved that Moussaoui, a 37-year-old student pilot from France, is eligible for the death penalty. The government contends he is because his failure to cooperate with the FBI in the weeks leading up to the attacks prevented agents from stopping the airplane hijackings. If all 12 jurors side with prosecutors, the trial will move to a second phase to decide whether Moussaoui will be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole. If jurors do not, the trial will be over and Moussaoui will automatically be sentenced to life. Earlier Tuesday, defense lawyers played videos of Bush administration officials testifying before the Sept. 11 Commission in 2004, in which they admitted numerous lapses in the federal law enforcement network during the summer of 2001. The defense argues that government ineptness, not Moussaoui's secrecy, prevented agents from uncovering the plot. Moussaoui's lawyers also had summaries of testimony read to the jury from several Al Qaeda leaders confined outside the country. They generally described Moussaoui as an unreliable member of Al Qaeda, and contradicted his claim that he was to fly a plane into the White House or to play any other role on Sept. 11. One spoke of an odd plot that Moussaoui was trying to develop in Malaysia involving a truck bomb made from as much as 40 pounds of ammonium nitrate. "Moussaoui was very troubled; he was not right in the head," said Encep Nurjaman, a Southeast Asian operative better known as Hambali. He said terrorists in Malaysia purchased four pounds of the fertilizer, and were stuck with the bill when Moussaoui abruptly left Southeast Asia and eventually made his way to the United States and flight school. But Fitzgerald stole the day when he testified as the government's single rebuttal witness. He described the jailhouse negotiations with Moussaoui as a "low-key, quiet and civil meeting." Moussaoui opened the session by saying he wanted to testify in his trial - but as a government witness. At the time, and even up until he took the stand Monday, his court-appointed lawyers had repeatedly pleaded with him not to testify. They even urged the judge not to allow it. Moussaoui, clearly worried that his lawyers would block his chance to testify, was turning to the FBI and prosecutors for help. Fitzgerald said Moussaoui pledged to tell them and the jury everything he had done to advance the Sept. 11 plot. It was at that meeting, Fitzgerald said, that Moussaoui first claimed that he was to pilot a 5th plane on Sept. 11 and fly it into the White House. But the agent said the terrorist had declined to answer follow-up questions and flatly refused to give them broader information about the inner workings of Al Qaeda. With that, Fitzgerald said, the talks fell through. (source: Los Angeles Times) **************** Defense Tries to Undo Damage Moussaoui Did Defense lawyers trying to prevent the government from executing Zacarias Moussaoui for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ended their case on Tuesday with last-minute efforts to undo the damage he had inflicted on himself with testimony in which he calmly agreed to the charges against him. The lawyers presented the accounts of senior Qaeda terrorists who gave statements from captivity to deflate Mr. Moussaoui's surprise claim on Monday that he was to have played a major role in the Sept. 11 attacks. The Qaeda officials, whose testimony was recited in court, portrayed Mr. Moussaoui as an unreliable and unstable colleague who was unconnected to the Sept. 11 plot. "He had dreams about flying a plane into the White House," a South Asian terrorist known as Hambali, captured in 2003, was quoted as saying. Hambali said Mr. Moussaoui was known to be "not right in the head and having a bad character." Besides the account of Hambali, the defense on Tuesday offered the recollections of Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a financial and travel planner for Al Qaeda who worked closely with the Sept. 11 hijackers; Mohammed al-Qahtani, who is widely believed to be the real missing "20th hijacker"; and a Qaeda operative known as Khallad, whom investigators have linked to the bombing of two American embassies in Africa in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen 2000, as well as to the Sept. 11 plot. Mr. Al-Qahtani is imprisoned at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba; the others are being held in the secret detention system of the Central Intelligence Agency, which is believed to house about two dozen senior Qaeda officials. All provided statements that Mr. Moussaoui was never meant to be part of the Sept. 11 plot. Mr. Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers, who did not want him to testify, put on less than 2 full days of testimony, far less than did prosecutors. In a brief rebuttal, prosecutors produced evidence that Mr. Moussaoui had offered to testify for them against himself if they would have agreed to see that he spent his time before execution in a more comfortable jail cell. The suddenly accelerated pace of the trial means that the jury will begin deliberating Wednesday afternoon. After the jury departed for the day, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema turned away a defense bid to strike the death penalty, saying, "This case changed dramatically with Mr. Moussaoui's testimony Monday." In his few hours on the witness stand that day, Mr. Moussaoui appeared to undo much of the defense that his lawyers had built since the beginning of the trial, which is solely to determine whether he will be put to death or spend the rest of his life in jail. Mr. Moussaoui not only agreed with prosecutors that he was in Al Qaeda, he also asserted that he knew most of the hijackers and was to have flown a 5th plane on Sept. 11 into the White House. Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Moussaoui deserves to be executed because when he was arrested on Aug. 16 on immigration violations, he lied to investigators about his knowledge of Qaeda plans to fly planes into buildings. Had Mr. Moussaoui told the truth, the prosecutors have said, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Aviation Administration would have taken quick action to thwart the plot. Defense lawyers have pressed the idea that any information Mr. Moussaoui may have provided would have become part of the sea of unchecked leads in the days before the attacks. In completing their case Tuesday, the lawyers played a videotape for the jury of the testimony of Thomas J. Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director at the time of the attacks, before the commission investigating the attacks. Mr. Pickard was asked what he would have done if he had known three facts that became apparent to senior officials only after the attacks: that Mr. Moussaoui was an Islamic extremist taking flying lessons; that two identified Qaeda terrorists were probably in the country in August 2001; and that an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix had drafted a memorandum saying that he noticed an unusual number of young Middle Eastern men were enrolling in American flight schools and might be planning some hijacking plot. He replied that given the thousands of terrorism leads the bureau was evaluating in the summer of 2001, "I don't know, with all the information the F.B.I. collects, whether we would have had the ability to hone in specifically on those three items." In addition to the issue of what the F.B.I. may have done if Mr. Moussaoui had not lied, a major question the jury will have to consider is his real stature in Al Qaeda. Under a complicated federal death penalty law, the jury will first have to consider whether Mr. Moussaoui is responsible for any deaths on Sept. 11. Only if jurors are unanimous in deciding that he was do they move to the next phase in which they consider whether he should be executed. The Sept. 11 commission did not offer firm conclusions about Mr. Moussaoui's role, speculating that he might have been kept in reserve as a substitute pilot. But the commission noted that Al Qaeda had invested heavily in him, providing more than $30,000 for travel and pilot training. Eleanor J. Hill, the staff director of the joint Congressional investigation of 9/11, said that the planners told participants little in advance about their respective roles, so it is possible that Mr. Moussaoui did not know what his Qaeda superiors would ultimately have ordered him to do. Ms. Hill said Mr. Moussaoui's dramatic courtroom statements might well be self-aggrandizing exaggerations or outright inventions. "He clearly wants the world to know he wants to kill Americans," said Ms. Hill, a Washington lawyer. "Why wouldn't he want to exaggerate and glorify his potential role in an attack he considers a huge success? If he's just a bystander, he doesn't get much of a place in history." (source: New York Times)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, USA, CALIF., VA.
Rick Halperin Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:32:17 -0600 (Central Standard Time)
