The judge in the trial of convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui says she told jurors that they made the right decision in sparing his life.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema also said in an April speech at Colby College that she was troubled by the government's belated admission that it failed to turn over evidence that could have been key, a frustration she has expressed other times since the trial concluded in 2006.
One of the saddest realities I've had to face — in the Moussaoui case in particular — has been the reality that my government didn't always tell me the truth, Brinkema said.
She declined Wednesday through her chambers to comment on the speech. An audio recording of her remarks has since been posted on the Internet.
Moussaoui, the only person to stand trial in a U.S. court in the 9/11 attacks, pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiring with al-Qaida to hijack aircraft, among other crimes. Prosecutors sought the death penalty, and 11 of the 12 jurors wanted to execute Moussaoui.
But a lone holdout favored the life term. Federal law requires an unanimous verdict for a death sentence, so the lone dissenter meant that Moussaoui was automatically sentenced to life.
Brinkema said the holdout after the decision asked me if I thought they'd got it right, and I said, 'Yeah, I think you did.'
Brinkema said she later bumped into that juror at a legal forum and told him that he'd done an extraordinary service to the legal system because the fallout from the government's failure to turn over evidence would have been horrendous if Moussaoui had actually been sent to death row.
In November, more than a year after the trial, prosecutors wrote a letter to Brinkema admitting that the CIA had wrongly assured her that no recordings existed of interrogations of certain high-profile terrorism detainees. In fact, two videotapes and one audio tape had been made.
In her speech, Brinkema said she always suspected that the interrogations had been videotaped. Colby, located in Waterville, Maine, awarded her an honorary degree the night of the speech, according to the school's Web site.
Brinkema said she did not blame the prosecutors who handled the case day to day. Instead she faulted the folks behind them who were giving me misinformation.
The CIA has since admitted that it destroyed videos showing harsh interrogation techniques used against two al-Qaida suspects, and a federal prosecutor is investigating if anything criminal was done. That investigation has delayed Moussaoui's appeal.
CIA spokesman George Little said Wednesday that the agency takes seriously its responsibility to provide accurate information to the courts.
In the Moussaoui case, it was the CIA that found the material and brought the matter to the attention of the Department of Justice, Little said.
A Justice Department spokesman declined comment on Brinkema's remarks, citing the ongoing appellate case.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said it struck him as unusual that a judge would tell a jury that its decision was right or wrong.
But she lived with the trial for a very long time and I assume she had a pretty tight bond with that jury, Tobias said.
Edward MacMahon, one of Moussaoui's trial lawyers, said the stark language Brinkema used to criticize the government on the lack of disclosures demonstrates the severity of the issue.
What this really does is call into question the integrity of the process, and that's very unfortunate, he said.
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On the Net:
Audio of Brinkema's speech: http://www.colby.edu/academics_cs/goldfarb/brody/
