Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty |
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Founded
in 1928, MCADP is the oldest active anti-death penalty organization
in the United States.
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Detail of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco from the cartoon of a mural by Ben Shahn © Estate of Ben Shahn /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY |
The Moussaoui Verdict A federal jury in Virginia has sentenced Zacarias Moussaoui to life in prison. The verdict comes as a considerable surprise. Moussaoui is the one person to be tried for the September 11 attacks, and he is likely to be the only person ever tried because the 19 hijackers are all dead and the man who planned the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, is being held incommunicado by the U.S. Government in an effort to learn all it can from him about any future attacks Al Queda might be planning. If there was ever a case in which the government could obtain a verdict of death, it would seem to have been one in which the defendant was charged with complicity in the mass murder of over 3,000 Americans, a role he admitted. A verdict of death became even more likely when the jury, at the end of the first phase of the trial, found that Moussaoui was sufficiently responsible for September 11 to make him eligible for the death penalty. But a death verdict never came. Why not? The reason sheds some light on one of the typical justifications for capital punishment. The punishment should fit the crime, say death penalty advocates. When a gruesome killing has been committed, what else should be done with the person who did it other than execute him? There is an answer to the question -- life imprisonment, the choice made by the Moussaoui jury -- but for the moment focus on the question, not the answer. The problem with the question is that it assumes, quite erroneously, that a verdict of death will automatically follow from the prosecution of a heinous murder, if a jury is given that option. However, that’s not the way the criminal justice system works. It is set up to allow more severe punishment for more serious crimes. But in the real world of criminal prosecutions, the actual punishment meted out, be it to a murderer or a shoplifter, does not depend entirely on the seriousness of the crime. It depends as much, if not more, on the amount of evidence there is against the defendant. The Moussaoui prosecution faltered in its effort to obtain the death penalty because its theory connecting Moussaoui to September 11 was weak. In order to obtain the death penalty, federal prosecutors had to show that the September 11 victims died as a direct result of Moussaoui’s acts. That would not have been hard if Moussaoui was a September 11 conspirator. But by the time the case was tried, the speculation that Moussaoui might have been the 20th hijacker was long gone. Instead, it was fairly well agreed that Moussaoui was in this country to take flight lessons to learn to pilot a plane as part of a nascent plot for a second wave of attacks on buildings on West Coast and Chicago buildings. Because he was part of a different conspiracy, the prosecution had to rely on a far more tenuous legal theory. The government claimed that Moussaoui’s statement, made when he was arrested in August 2001, that he was just a tourist taking flying lessons hindered the potential investigation of the September 11 plot and, had he told the truth, all the deaths on September 11 could have been avoided. This argument has considerable emotional appeal. If only Moussaoui had paid attention to the humanity of the Americans he encountered, maybe then, when given the opportunity to speak, he would have recognized how grievously wrong was the plot he was participating in, and told all he could in an effort to prevent whatever attacks Al Queda was planning. But it doesn’t make for much of a legal case. The idea that Moussaoui’s lie about why he was taking flight lesson led to September 11 had little merit because the agent who arrested him didn’t believe the lie. And a number of jurors questioned whether the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for lying. As for the claim that Moussaoui had some obligation to tell the truth or face the death penalty, it was met with considerable skepticism by the trial judge, Leonie Brinkema, who described the prosecution’s theory as treading on “very delicate legal ground,” since she did not “know of any other case in which a defendant’s failure to act has been a sufficient basis for the death penalty.” In any event, what the one or more jurors who refused to vote for death focused on was how little Moussaoui had to tell, even if he had talked. Moussaoui’s ever changing efforts to put himself in the middle of events were wholly unconvincing. The best evidence that came out at the trial about what Moussaoui knew came from a lengthy statement of Khalid Sheik Mohammed “made under circumstances designed to elicit truthful” answers, as the government coyly described it. Sheik Mohammed was obsessed with secrecy. Only those with a need to know were told the details of the September 11 plot. Moussaoui was not one of those people. He knew he was eventually to fly a plane on a suicide mission, but he didn’t know when or where (and neither did Mohammed, for the planning was never completed). Moussaoui was never told that a plane attack would occur before the one he was training for or that any of the hijackers involved in that attack, none of whom he met, were in the U.S. No wonder then that three of the jurors on their verdict forms noted that Moussaoui had only a “minor role, if any” in the September 11 attack and “limited knowledge of it” at the time of his arrest. In the end, justice was served. The case is so unlike the typical murder prosecution that all along it seemed it would have little influence on the domestic debate over capital punishment. But given the surprising verdict, it may give pause to those who think that the death penalty is the obvious and only response to the commission of a terrible crime.Once Congress enacted these laws, however, they ceased to be simply demonstrations of political will. They were on the statute books waiting for the Justice Department to enforce. Because some states do not have the a death penalty, the Justice Department had to make a choice about to handle capital prosecutions occurring in Puerto Rico and the 12 states that have no death penalty. It could have applied the law neutrally throughout the country or respected the wishes of the jurisdictions that have rejected the death penalty. The Justice Department under Attorney General Ashcroft has chosen a third way. While Justice Department guidelines require that there be a "substantial federal interest" in prosecution and that the absence of a death penalty in the jurisdiction is not enough reason to seek the death penalty, U.S. attorneys may nonetheless consider whether the "appropriate punishment" is available at the state level. In practice, the Justice Department has been actively pursuing capital punishment in non-death penalty jurisdictions. Although it has been remarkably unsuccessful in obtaining death sentences in general of late - in only 1 out of the last 20 federal capital trials did a jury choose to impose death, it will no doubt continue to try as it is in the Sampson case. Even if the Justice Department fails to convince a jury that Sampson deserves a death sentence -- and it may fail given Sampson's aborted attempt to turn himself in before he killed, his voluntary surrender, and his willingness to acknowledge his guilt -- it will have succeeded in making death penalty prosecutions a fact of life in Massachusetts. By inuring the public to such prosecutions, the federal government will give local advocates of the death penalty the opportunity to argue that capital cases are simply a routine part of the criminal justice system and there is therefore no reason to fuss about reinstating the death penalty. We at MCADP will not sit still for this end run around Massachusetts's considered decision to reject the death penalty. We will take every opportunity during the trial and thereafter not only to oppose the Justice Department's attempt to sentence an individual to death, but to articulate that any such effort to import the death penalty here is an assault on the state's political process. by James Rooney |
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Copyright © 2002
Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty, Inc.\ |
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