Terror Trial Triumph, With a Trick. This 11-pager penned by a juror chronicles a major trial of two arms dealers who trafficked with terrorist groups. It gives a flavor of the travails--in this case, successfully surmounted--of putting terror defendants on trial. Notable in this case also, however, are three facts jurors were not told until after the trial, per the judge's decision, made in pursuit of a fair trial for the defendants: (1) evidence that one defendant had in prior instances cooperated with Spanish & American intelligence; (2) evidence that the defendants had engaged in drug dealing; (3) the fact that one defendant had been acquitted in a trial when he was charged with supplying arms to the hijackers who seized the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, during which an elderly Jew confined to a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, was shot to death and then dumped into the Mediterranean.
The defendant's acquittal in the 1985 trial came after two witnesses who were to testify for the prosecution at the trial were murdered, and a third witness withdrew after his child was kidnapped. Thus, jurors who were selected to sit at this trial of a highly dangerous defendant were not told that by doing so they potentially put their own lives and family in jeopardy, should they vote to convict. Ignorant of this risk, the jurors voted to convict on all counts, and the judge sentenced them to 30 & 25 years respectively, in maximum security prison.
Bottom Line. It is a fair inference that had prospective jurors been told of what the one defendant had apparently done in the earlier trial they would have done anything to get out of serving. Which emphasizes the point about American criminal trials: Fairness to defendants, no matter how heinous they are, comes first; fairness to anyone else, no matter how innocent, comes after.
Lawfare Wins an Appeal. The ever-liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (one of the 12 federal appellate panels immediately below the Supreme Court) ruled in Al-Kidd v. Ashcroft (9/4/09) that former Bush 43 Attorney-General John Ashcroft is not legally immune from suit filed by 70 plaintiffs who claim they were wrongly detained as material witnesses in the immediate post-9/11 roundup.
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