Moussaoui’s death penalty case goes to jury

updated 8:44 p.m. ET March 29, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The death-penalty case against al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui went to the jury Wednesday after the prosecution asserted his lies were responsible for deaths Sept. 11, 2001, and the defense argued he had no part in the plot.

The nine men and three women on the jury will decide whether Moussaoui bears blame for at least one death that day. If so, a second phase of the trial will open that will determine whether he deserves to be executed.

The jurors left the courthouse Wednesday afternoon and will resume their deliberations on Thursday and Friday.

If not sentenced to execution, the 37-year-old Frenchman will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Moussaoui watched the closing arguments impassively but shouted “Victory to Moussaoui, God curse America,” during a recess after the judge and jury had left the room. The recess preceded U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s instructions to the jury.

“Zacarias Moussaoui came to this country to kill as many Americans as he could,” Prosecutor David Raskin said in closing arguments. “He was supposed to fly the fifth plane into the White House. Instead he killed people by lying and concealing the plot ... that resulted in the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history.”

Raskin said that Moussaoui lied “with lethal intent” when he failed to tell federal agents after his arrest in August 2001 about his al-Qaida membership and the plot to kill Americans using hijacked aircraft.

Defense lawyer Edward MacMahon countered that his client was merely an “al-Qaida hanger-on” who had nothing to do with Sept. 11. He accused the prosecution of trivializing bureaucratic blunders that might have prevented the 9/11 plot from being exposed.

Hypothetical situation, defense argues
“Moussaoui was never involved other than in his dreams,” MacMahon said, trying to minimize damage that Moussaoui might have done to himself when he claimed on the stand that he was to have crashed a plane into the White House on Sept. 11.

“The government cannot prove a hypothetical, what would have happened if Moussaoui had not lied,” he said. “We will never know what could have happened in the 25 days between Moussaoui’s arrest and Sept. 11.”

He said of his client: “He’s now trying to write a role for himself in history when in reality he’s an al-Qaida hanger-on.”

Prosecutors contended that if Moussaoui had told the truth after his arrest, investigators could have tracked down 11 of the 19 hijackers. “The FBI would have had the names, the phone numbers, and their addresses in some cases,” Raskin said.

The bottom line, he said, was that “he chose Osama bin Laden, and because of that, 2,900 are dead.”

MacMahon challenged the assertion that Moussaoui had led investigators on a goose chase with his deceptions. He said, for example, that the government had the identities of two of the hijackers 18 months before 9/11 when they were on U.S. soil — men who had been previously under CIA surveillance in Malaysia — and still did nothing.

Of that missed opportunity, he said: “That’s bingo.”

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