An angry federal judge unexpectedly recessed the death penalty trial of confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to consider whether government violations of her rules against coaching witnesses should remove the death penalty as an option.
"This is the second significant error by the government affecting the constitutional rights of the defendant and the criminal justice system in this country in the context of a death case," (U.S. District Judge Leonie) Brinkema told lawyers in the case outside the presence of the jury.
"In all the years I've been on the bench, I have never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses," she said.
I suppose the bright side is at least the judge in this case is acting on this, though given the fact that it's obvious this is not going to be a fair trial merely dropping the death penalty seems weak to me. If Zacarias Moussaoui can not be convicted based on real evidence, the implication that he should somehow be happy to spend life in prison from a possible faulty conviction isn't very reassuring. The goal here should be convicting those who are guilty, not creating a conviction so it can be held up as some sort of proof that the government is taking terrorism seriously.
5 comments:
Sounds to me like this judge has an extremely high opinion of herself and the scopeof her authority.
Does she believe that this case, regardless of the outcome, won't be reexamined, challenged and rehashed ad infinitum?
Moussaoui is more likely to die of old age that from the carrying out of ANY imposed sentence (unless he commits suicide out of sheer disgust/frustration first...
Or maybe she's trying to have this be the real outcome rather than merely passing it from one court to the other.
If it's done right and fairly the first time it does reduce the chance of it going from court to court to court in and endless cycle of appeals.
I haven't done any research on the judge, but to me it seemed like she was frustrated with the rules being broken yet again.
Fair is when your side wins, and since there are two sides. . .
I think Moussaoui would prefer to die and wouldn't appeal. Lawyers may, but I don't think he will. He wanted to be a martyr, but messed up and this is his way to become relevant to crazy people everywhere
She has the option of pushing through a mistrial. I suspect that if she really cared about the bad behavior here, she'd go for that. Otherwise, it's seems like it's just for show.
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