No Virgins For You!

Zacarias Moussaoui misses out on martyrdom and 72 virgins.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. May 3 — A federal jury rejected the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui on Wednesday, with some jurors concluding that he played only a minor role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The verdict, calling for life in prison, seemed to surprise most people in the courtroom, notably Justice Department prosecutors who had relentlessly urged the jurors that Mr. Moussaoui should be executed for his role in the attacks.

Jurors left the courthouse without speaking about their reasoning. But the verdict form they filled out indicated what factors they had considered as they decided Mr. Moussaoui’s fate, including his troubled upbringing in a dysfunctional immigrant Moroccan family in France, and extended periods in orphanages.

The decision means that the sole individual charged in a United States courtroom in connection with the worst attack on American soil will spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement in a federal prison in Colorado with no possibility of release.

Life in solitary is no picnic. And regardless of how you fall on the issue of the death penalty, I would think that it would give you pause to think that imposing the death penalty would make this guy into a martyr for the cause and possibly inspire others to follow in his footsteps.

That, and the guy is batshit crazy, and the only thing linking him to the attacks is his own confession. Plus, he was in jail on 9/11.

The jury questionnaire revealed very complex reasons for the verdict, with various jurors selecting different mitigating factors. None, apparently, said that the martyrdom he craved was a factor in their decision. But they did consider his upbringing, racism he suffered in France, and his limited role in the attacks:

In the complicated 42-page verdict given to Judge Brinkema, the jurors listed how many agreed with each of the more than two dozen mitigating factors put forward by the defense. The form said two mitigating factors drew the greatest agreement, with nine jurors finding that they were valid issues to be weighed in the decision.

The first was that Mr. Moussaoui suffered an “unstable early childhood and dysfunctional family” life, and a hostile relationship with his mother that led to his being placed in French orphanages.

The second factor was that his father “had a violent temper and physically and emotionally abused his family.”

Three jurors found that another valid mitigating factor to be weighed against the death and destruction of the Sept. 11 attacks was that Mr. Moussaoui had been subjected to racism in France as a Muslim youth.

Few members of the jury of nine men and three women seemed to have been persuaded by defense lawyers’ other major arguments. No one agreed to spare Mr. Moussaoui’s life in order to give him the martyrdom that he sometimes suggested he craved, and no one thought that he had schizophrenia, a contested topic in the trial.

Three jurors added their own mitigating factor, writing on the jury form that they believed that Mr. Moussaoui had limited knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot. That meant that they had rejected an important argument of the prosecutors, that Mr. Moussaoui should be held responsible for Sept. 11, even though he was in jail at the time.

Another factor was that families of the victims testified for both the defense and for the prosecution — which meant, essentially, some supported letting him rot in jail and some supported executing him. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the prosecution’s tactics simply exhausted the jury. As The Rude Pundit explained a couple of weeks ago:

Let’s say, and why not, that you are a juror in the Zacharias Moussaoui penalty trial. You have been placed in a locked room with a couple of dozen people. And while in that locked room, you are forced to listen, for hours and hours, to recordings from victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. You’re forced to hear the sounds of airline pilots of United Flight 93 gurgling through their slit throats. You’re forced to listen to dozens of cell phone calls from people about to die or in the process of dying, including the nightmarish final screams of people in the World Trade Center as the buildings collapsed. You have to look at photos of charred Pentagon corpses, human jerky, and pictures of the exploded water balloon bodies of people who leapt from 90 stories high. You are forced to listen to a parade of testimony from people talking about trying to save others, including tales of heroic rescuers who couldn’t hold onto victims because the burned skin kept sliding off in their hands. You hear stories from people who survived, from the families of those who died, about children wanting their parents or uncles. It goes on, day after day, images and descriptions of people leaping, people scrambling, people dying. You, though, are locked in the room. You can’t get up and leave. You can’t turn the page, click over to the comics, change the channel. And all of it is being paraded in front of you so you can decide whether or not the bugfuck insane egomaniac in the defendant’s chair should be executed.

. . .

No, fuck Moussaoui. The Rude Pundit wonders at what point does the jury in the Zacharias Moussaoui trial get to stop being tortured? If this was being done to prisoners at Gitmo, we’d be up in arms. ‘Cause the trial’s gonna end, soon, and they’re gonna leave that locked room, and then we have a dozen or so people who have to go on with their lives hearing the echoes of those cries, those screams, closing their eyes and seeing those corpses. And for what good? In the end, none. Just another stage in our ongoing fetishization of 9/11, our American mourning that we’re never allowed to move on from.