Moussoui Found Eligible for Death Penalty
The jury verdict is in. Moussauoui has been found eligible for the death penalty. The jury found his lies to the FBI agents were directly responsible for at least one death in the 9/11 attacks. The jury was unanimous in its findings.
Moussaoui's response:
"You'll never get my blood, God curse you all."
The jury will now decide whether he lives or dies. They will hear victim impact testimony from the survivors of those who died.
The defense has filed a motion regarding mitigation evidence, but it's under seal. However, this much is known:
Court-appointed defense lawyers, whom Moussaoui has tried to reject, will summon experts to suggest he is schizophrenic after an impoverished childhood during which he faced racism in France over his Moroccan ancestry.
Kudos to the defense team who did an outstanding job defending an impossibly difficult client in a case in which emotions ran higher than any since the Oklahoma City Bombing trial of Timothy McVeigh and in a jurisdiction in which the community was so highly invested in the the outcome.
Moussaoui did not participate in 9/11, he didn't even know the date it would occur or the intended targets, yet he is likely to be killed. Moussauoui was his own worst enemy.
Update: Great commentary by Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate:
Yet because of Moussaoui's false testimony, the government's nutty conspiracy theory, and the nation's need for closure, Moussaoui's name will be in the history books and the law books for all time; inextricably linked with 9/11, just as it has always been in his dreams. And perhaps we will all sleep better for believing that if Moussaoui had come forward and told what little he knew, we could have stopped those terrible attacks, just as it happens in our own dreams. How lucky for Moussaoui that his fantasies and ours are such a perfect match.
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