May 8, 2006

Hope for our country?

Some jurors saw Moussaoui as minor in 9/11: report - Yahoo! News
The juror told the Post he was one of three people on the panel who wrote a "mitigating factor" on the verdict form, saying that Moussaoui, 37, had "limited knowledge" of the September 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 juror said.

I'm still trying to figure out how he even qualifies for life in prison. From the publicly available information he is guilty of obstruction of justice, and MAYBE conspiracy to commit murder. However, his actual connection to 9/11/2001 seems tenuous. Especially given how hard the prosocution tried to make the case that meerly knowing there was going to be an attack without any of the details that they seem unable to prove Moussaoui knew, would have prevented the attack.

He is a despicable person. (One that I'm not all together convinced isn't mentally ill.) However, that shouldn't qualify him for life in prison or execution. After all I think our president and most of his cronies are despicable people but that alone doesn't qualify them for perminent loss of freedom. In this country we aren't supposed to lock people up just because we don't like what they have to say or what they think or even what they want to do. We are only supposed to lock people up for what they do.

To me this case was largely about holding someone accountable. Even if it was someone who only knew it was going to happen (IIRC he didn't even actually know when/where it was going to specifically happen just that it was going to.) The governement has failed to capture the masterminds behind this attack or the attacks in Iraq (notice how many times they have captured the 2nd most important Alqaeda in Iraq?) so they needed to hang someone, especially now that most of the country knows that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11/2001.

The good news to me are these lines:
He also told the newspaper that a number of jurors questioned whether "the death penalty is really an appropriate punishment for lying."
...
"It was very difficult to hear. It was like attending one funeral after another for days on end," he said. "But we had to move beyond our own emotions and really focus on the law."

However, I would have felt better if this sentiment had been at the original tial not the sentencing trial. Because unlike in movies like The Rock we aren't supposed to lock people up as a preventative measure.

Posted by pqbon at May 8, 2006 4:55 PM