Moussaoui jury chooses life sentence

WASHINGTON – Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui will spend the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks after a federal jury rejected the government’s four-year quest to secure his execution for the deadliest terrorist strike on American soil.

After weeks of listening to harrowing testimony from 9/11 family members, hearing heartbreaking emergency calls and watching painful video of victims jumping to their deaths, the anonymous jury of nine men and three women methodically deliberated for 41 hours over seven days before reaching its verdict Wednesday at U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. Jurors very carefully went over each question on a 42-page verdict form that gave only a few clues to their thoughts and reasoning. In the end, though, the form indicated that prosecutors could not surmount the main obstacle hanging over their case from the start: Moussaoui didn’t hijack anything on Sept. 11 because he was sitting in jail.

Jurors could not decide unanimously that Moussaoui caused the nearly 3,000 deaths on Sept. 11, nor could they agree that he committed his crimes “in an especially heinous, cruel or depraved manner.” Three jurors took it upon themselves to write that Moussaoui had “limited knowledge of the 9/11 attack plans.”

“The jury seemed to be saying that he is a bit player, someone at the periphery,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. “It boils down to someone whose hands were not drenched in blood.”

As the verdict was announced, Moussaoui rolled his eyes and looked glum. But he yelled “America, you lost. … I won!” as he was escorted back to jail. Family members of Sept. 11 victims, who had long awaited this day, showed little visible reaction in the courtroom’s third row.

Moussaoui is the only person charged in an American courtroom in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. After four years of delays, twists and turns in his criminal case, he pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy charges.

He now will live out his days in the nation’s super-maximum security prison in Florence, Colo. Prosecutors cannot appeal the jury’s decision, which is technically a recommendation, but one that U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema is legally bound to uphold. She is scheduled to sentence Moussaoui formally this morning.

The verdict was a resounding victory for Moussaoui’s defense team, which battled through the higher and lower courts for a client who admitted allegiance to Osama bin Laden, vowed to kill Americans, had pleaded guilty against their advice to the country’s worst crime, fought them at every turn and visibly despised them.

Outside the courthouse Wednesday, one of them, Gerald T. Zerkin – called a “Jew pig” by Moussaoui – said the jurors had concluded that Moussaoui’s “knowledge of 9/11 and his role in 9/11 was not that great.”

Defense lawyer Edward B. MacMahon Jr. said the dozen Sept. 11 family members who testified for the defense – in defiance of more than three dozen family members who testified for the prosecution – had “testified as citizens of a free nation, uncowed by terrorism.”

“None of them testified for Moussaoui,” MacMahon said.

Prosecutors were in a grimmer mood, but elements of their message were the same: that the justice system, which often seemed tied in knots by the Moussaoui case and its serial delays and twists, had worked in the end. The Justice Department insisted on trying Moussaoui in the criminal courts to show that the system could handle complex terrorism matters, resisting pressure from others in the government who wanted to bring Moussaoui before a military tribunal.

“At times this was a maddening experience,” a grim-faced Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty said outside the courthouse, flanked by two dozen prosecutors. Despite the verdict, McNulty, who as U.S. attorney in Alexandria headed the prosecution until his recent promotion, said the case was an “opportunity to tell a very important story.”

President Bush said during a meeting with the visiting German chancellor that the verdict left him undaunted in the fight against terror. “Mr. Moussaoui got a fair trial,” Bush said. “I know that it’s really important for the United States to stay on the offense against these killers and bring them to justice.” He added that the jury chose to spare Moussaoui’s life even though that “is something that he evidently wasn’t willing to do for innocent American citizens.”

Some legal experts agreed that the case, and especially the jury’s reluctance to impose a death sentence, had brought out the best of American justice, despite the complications. “No one can accuse this of being a kangaroo court or say Moussaoui was railroaded,” Hoffman said.

But others said the verdict showed that the government had wasted years and millions of taxpayer dollars pursuing Moussaoui when prosecutors could have settled for a life sentence several years ago. “We would have spared ourselves enormous cost and expense and having to deal with Moussaoui and giving him the forum he wanted,” said Stephen Salzberg, a law professor at George Washington University. “The government will say the 9/11 families got closure and had a chance to tell their stories, but the fact is they didn’t get closure. What they got was a defendant who insulted them and demeaned their dead.”

Wednesday’s verdict culminated a seven-week sentencing trial that became an outpouring of emotion reflecting the national trauma that still surrounds the attacks. It remained uncertain whether the man whose life was spared views the decision as a positive development or a setback. Moussaoui’s testimony during the trial convinced many legal experts that he wanted to die a martyr. But jurors rejected that notion, saying on the verdict form that none of them believed that Moussaoui wanted to die or that his execution would be part of his jihad.

Instead, a majority of the jurors sided with the defense suggestion that Moussaoui had an unstable childhood and a violent father and agreed those were mitigating factors against Moussaoui’s execution.

In reaching its verdict, the jury waded through a “special verdict form” that explored issues such as whether Moussaoui was responsible for the Sept. 11 deaths and whether executing him would make him a martyr. Federal death penalty law mandates that jurors go through such an exercise, which involves weighing the “aggravating factors” submitted by prosecutors against “mitigating factors” proposed by the defense.

Federal juries nationwide have also preferred life over death by a 2-to-1 margin since the early 1990s, statistics show. None of the five defendants eligible of the death penalty in the Alexandria courthouse actually received it.

Jurors on Wednesday concluded unanimously that prosecutors had proven most of the aggravating factors, including that Moussaoui showed no remorse and that the Sept. 11 attacks caused vast damage in New York and Washington. Their reaction to the mitigators varied widely. Nine jurors agreed with the defense that Moussaoui’s dysfunctional early childhood and abusive father was a mitigator, but none found that executing Moussaoui would make him a martyr.

No jurors agreed with the defense that a sentence of life in prison would be a greater punishment.