Moussaoui ruled eligible for death

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal jury concluded Monday that al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is eligible for the death penalty, sending his trial into a final stage that will decide whether he deserves to forfeit his life for the deaths of Sept. 11, 2001, or is mentally too unstable to warrant execution.

The unanimous decision marked a major victory for the government, which has struggled to win trial verdicts in terror prosecutions since the Sept. 11 attacks. Prosecutors were aided by Moussaoui himself, whose insistence on taking the stand helped offset government blunders.

The jury of nine men and three women deliberated about 16 hours over four days before sending word they had reached a decision. Lawyers, families of Sept. 11 victims, federal marshals and others began packing the courtroom well in advance of the 4 p.m. EDT reading of the verdict.

Before the jury was brought in, Moussaoui could be heard yelling from behind a courtroom wall, where he was kept in a holding cell. The jurors then entered the courtroom, and the forewoman, a middle-aged school teacher from northern Virginia, said they had reached a verdict.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema asked Moussaoui to rise. He refused, instead remaining defiantly in his seat, his head tilted back against the wall, speaking softly to himself as if in prayer.

After the verdict was read, the 37-year-old Frenchman screamed, "You'll never get my blood! God curse your souls!"

The second and final phase of the trial, expected to last two to three weeks, is to begin Thursday. Prosecutors will urge the same jury to sentence him to death. They will focus on his self-avowed loyalty to al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

They also will summon up to 45 people who were injured in the attacks or lost loved ones, and have them tell their stories of suffering.

Moussaoui's lawyers plan to present mitigating evidence and testimony about his troubled childhood in Europe, as well as indications that he suffers from schizophrenia. That is crucial, because the Supreme Court has ruled that the mentally ill cannot be executed.

If jurors come back with a death sentence, it will mark the end of the only Sept. 11-related prosecution in the United States and the only time anyone has been handed the ultimate punishment in a terror case since America was attacked.

The two-stage process — of first determining whether a defendant is eligible for the death penalty and then deciding whether he should die — is standard procedure in the federal system, but it is usually part of a single deliberation. Brinkema decided to split the process into separate proceedings.

The verdict found that Moussaoui was eligible under federal law because he acted intentionally to cause deaths on Sept. 11. Now, the jury will consider a list of "aggravating factors" under the law to determine whether he should be put to death. Among the factors is whether the crime was committed in an especially "heinous, cruel or depraved manner."

Defense lawyers said Moussaoui's mental state and his decision to testify in his own defense would be issues his lawyers would raise on appeal. But they said those prospects appeared slim in the near term, especially in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Brinkema's court. Statistics show that, of all the federal appeals courts, "they are the least likely to overturn a death sentence," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

Moussaoui was taking flight lessons in Minnesota when he was arrested less than a month before the attacks. The government contended that if he had told FBI agents what he knew about the plot, they could have headed off the attacks. Jurors agreed, drawing the key conclusion that he was directly responsible for at least one of the nearly 3,000 deaths on Sept. 11.

Prosecutors stumbled badly when a government lawyer improperly coached witnesses ahead of their testimony, and the judge barred much of the government's case.

The defense introduced evidence that the FBI ignored warnings of an impending attack, and would have likely ignored Moussaoui as well. Defense lawyers also obtained interrogation statements from high-level al-Qaida operatives who said Moussaoui was incompetent and was not slated to play any role Sept. 11.

But Moussaoui's testimony, over his lawyers' objections, dramatically changed the tenor of the trial. He claimed he was scheduled to hijack a fifth airplane and fly it into the White House on Sept. 11, talked matter-of-factly of how he had looked forward to killing Americans, and said that after his arrest he lied to the FBI so that the plot could go forward.

The forewoman said the jury was unanimous on each of the three counts against Moussaoui: conspiracy to commit international terrorism, to destroy aircraft and to use weapons of mass destruction.

Moussaoui has told his defense lawyers he wants to die, and some family members of victims have seized on that to voice opposition to executing him. They said they don't want to "make him a martyr."

But outside the court Monday, Rosemary Dillard, an American Airlines manager, recalled losing four flight attendants she supervised as well as her husband, Eddie. All were aboard the plane that struck the Pentagon. She said her husband was sitting next to one of the hijackers.

"The 2,972 people deserve this," she said of the jury's decision. "This man has no soul. He has no conscience."