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Juries convinced mousaui lied about involvement Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Moussaoui deemed bit player by jurors
By Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — A juror in the death-penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui said Thursday that some panel members decided the al-Qaida conspirator should not be executed because he was a bit player in the Sept. 11 attacks and did not kill anyone that day.
"He wasn't necessarily part of the 9/11 operation," said the juror, who spoke about the jury's deliberations on condition of anonymity. "His role in 9/11 was actually minor," said the juror, who voted for a life prison sentence even though he considered Moussaoui "a despicable character" and someone who "mocks and taunts family members whose loved ones died."
Moussaoui did just that one final time Thursday, when he was formally sentenced at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., to life in prison without parole — a day after the jury rejected the death penalty. The only person convicted in the United States in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, he confronted the families of the victims and the judge he has spent years insulting.
Even after U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema instructed him not to make a political speech, Moussaoui, 37, leaned forward in his chair, his lips touching a microphone and hissed: "God curse America, and God save Osama bin Laden! You will never get him!"
Brinkema replied with a smile, noting that Moussaoui had yelled "America, you lost! ... I won!" after the jury delivered its verdict. "Mr. Moussaoui, if you look around this courtroom today, every person in this room when this proceeding is over will leave this courtroom, and they are free to go anyplace they want," she said before pronouncing the mandatory life sentence. "They can go outside, and they can feel the sun, they can smell fresh air ... but when you leave this courtroom, you go back into custody. In terms of winners and losers, it is quite clear who won yesterday and who lost yesterday."
The judge concluded by voicing contempt for Moussaoui's oft-expressed desire to have been part of the Sept. 11 operation, in which he said he was supposed to fly a fifth hijacked airplane into the White House.
"You came here to be a martyr and to die in a big bang of glory," Brinkema said. "But to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, you will die with a whimper."
And with that, the judge left the courtroom. Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiring with al-Qaida in the Sept. 11 attacks, was expected to be transferred soon from the Alexandria, Va., jail to the nation's only "super maximum" security prison, in Florence, Colo., where he will live out his days in solitary confinement.
It was precisely Moussaoui's testimony — when the Sept. 11 conspirator took the stand and gleefully said he had planned to attack the White House with a crew that included "shoe bomber" Richard Reid — that convinced one of the jurors that he was embellishing his role.
"The moment he said the name Richard Reid, I thought he was lying," the juror said in an interview Thursday. "It seemed like Moussaoui's role in 9/11 was increasing over time."
Although the juror would not give the jury's final vote, he said he thought it was important for people to understand how the nine men and three women methodically arrived at their verdict.
For this juror, the hardest part was the nightmares. On many nights, he said, he struggled to block out the voice of the Sept. 11 conspirator, spitting venom at America.
Equally traumatic were his nightmares about the relatives of victims who testified. "It was very difficult to hear. It was like attending one funeral after another for days on end," the juror said. "But we had to move beyond our own emotions and really focus on the law."
When they did that, a number of jurors questioned whether "the death penalty is really an appropriate punishment for lying" to the FBI about the terrorist plot, the juror said. He said a number of jurors thought Moussaoui "wasn't fully aware of the 9/11 plot. He may have been part of a parallel operation, a second wave of attacks, but he wasn't anywhere close to flying a plane on 9/11."
The jury took 41 hours to decide on life in prison — considered long even for a death-penalty case — because the 42-page verdict form was so complicated, the juror said. He said the panel went through the form question by question and voted on each "aggravating" or "mitigating" factor individually after discussing it. "The number of questions was really quite significant," the juror said. "That's why we were in there for so long."
The juror praised Brinkema's handling of the case and lawyers for both sides but said the nightmares about the case have continued and that "I never, ever want to be on jury duty for the rest of my life."
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
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