The REAL Scoop in the Holy Land Case: How Acquittals Turned to Mistrials By Court

[McCamy Taylor]

Several people have posted threads based upon Reuters accounts of the Holy Land prosecutions which the federal government has been conducting in Dallas. Muslims in the U.S. who had gathered money to help Palestinians had been charged with aiding terrorists. Some of the evidence had come from an Israeli secret agent whose identity was hidden preventing the defense from doing a full cross examination. Reuters has discussed the basics of the verdict, however, it has ignored one aspect of the case. How did acquittals last Thursday turn into mistrials on Monday? The Fort Worth Star Telegram has three in depth articles which explain the very odd goings on in that Dallas court room.

Here is the verdict:

http://www.star-telegram.com/dallas_news/story/277209.html

Here is an attorney explaining how acquittals on Thursday turned into mistrials on Monday:

http://www.star-telegram.com/dallas_news/story/277213.html

Evans said he believed that because the verdict was turned in Thursday and sealed until Monday, jurors had ample time to reflect on their votes -- and perhaps change their minds -- and talk to many people about the case.

"It's very unfortunate that the verdict was not last week," said Evans, who tried to attend the verdict reading but couldn't make his way through the crowds at the federal courthouse in Dallas. "It appears they would have had complete verdicts on some people.

"They told the foreman that was their verdict, then they had all weekend -- they weren't sequestered and had all that time to reconsider and talk to people," he said. "There are such things as juror remorse."

More about the flip flopping jurors in the Holy Land case:

http://www.star-telegram.com/dallas_news/story/277212.html

The verdicts, as originally outlined, also suggested that the jury had found former Holy Land volunteer Mufid Abdulqader not guilty on all 32 terrorism-financing counts he was facing and had either acquitted or deadlocked on the same 32 counts for another former foundation chairman, Mohammed El-Mezain.

As those verdicts were read, many of the defendants and their families broke into smiles. But minutes later, their relief turned to uncertainty during the jury poll.

Jurors can't agree

The jury forewoman, who was not identified, told the court that she could not explain the positions of her fellow panelists. "When the vote was ... no one spoke up ," she said. "I really don't understand where it's coming from ... all 12 made that decision."

The judge excused the jurors to work out the discrepancies. About 40 minutes later, they returned to court, and the two female jurors both continued to maintain that their verdicts had not been tallied accurately. As a result, Abdulqader's acquittal on all counts was set aside.

What if jurors who had reached a consensus decision to acquit on these charges went home and got an ear full? Maybe they started looking things up on the internet. Maybe political friends stepped in and said "I can not believe that you let those towel heads go!"

Here is a story from last week about the decision to seal the verdict for four days and how unusual that was.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/101907dnmetholyland.182b06e34.html

Legal experts say that it is common for one judge to stand in for another in a case but not so common for a judge to seal a verdict, particularly for several days.

"Certainly in the vast majority of criminal and civil cases, if the judge is not available, some other judge will step in to take the verdict and read it," said Tom Melsheimer, a former federal prosecutor in Dallas now in private practice.

"That said, there are some occasions where a judge will hold a verdict either because they've got other commitments or are not available," he said. "It's infrequent for a court to seal a verdict in excess of 72 hours pending return to the bench."

Even before the strange case of the changing verdicts, the reporters at the Dallas Morning News smelled a rat. The million dollar question is did anyone from the federal prosecutors office, the Republican Party, the Bush administration or any one else with an interest in seeing these cases deadlocked get to these jurors--or to friends or acquaintances of the jurors-- over the weekend. And if they did, would the jurors even recognize that this was what was happening? We all know that this administration and its DOJ lies, cheats and does anything it can for political advantage.

I am no lawyer. If there are any lawyers here, I welcome your opinions. The Department of Justice has announced that it will retry the charges which were deadlocked including the ones in which all jurors initially voted to acquit and then later, after being unsequestered and exposed to material outside the trial, changed their minds. If the law is fair, the defendants will be able to appeal the judge's decision to declare a mistrial on these charges. I believe that a higher court must decide whether or not the presiding judge had a right to allow the jurors to change their decisions and call mistrials, and that this appeal must be handled before the DOJ can retry on any of these charges. Otherwise, what point was there in sealing the jurors' decision?

Something about this case stinks. My gut tells me that the federal prosecutors knew that in Dallas a case against a religious charity was going to be a tough sell, and that they knew that they were doing badly. Rather than be faced with the political scandal of a bunch of acquittals, the judge in the case handed the prosecution a bunch of mistrials instead. Whether or not the jurors were tampered with, no one will ever know. However, knowing what we do about the Bush DOJ, anything is possible.

One thing is certain. If, after the massive case the government put on, they could convince only two jurors---and those two only after they left the court and were exposed to friends, family, extraneous material and who knows what else---that the defendants were guilty---I see no logic in their decision to retry the charges that flipped from acquittals to mistrials.

[finished scoundrel]

1. Yes, it stinks.

I agree. The whole think stinks. I think it has less to do with terrorism or alleged terrorism than it does with cutting off help for the Palestinians and is part of the effort to bring them to their knees.

[Richard Steele]

2. This doesn't just stink, it REEKS. Some pretty OBVIOUS jury-tampering, for starters.

I'm too PISSED to comment further. Recommended with ANGER. :grr:

[Blackhatjack]

3. This is going to raise an interesting question if the defendants appeal...

A mistrial can occur for any reason that denies the defendant a fair trial. It can arise because of the conduct of the parties, conduct of the counsel, failure to follow the rules on discovery prior to trial, exposing the jury to inadmissible evidence, or inadvertant conduct of the presiding judge, each of which would mandate entry of a mistrial.

If the prosecution decides not to retry the defendants on these charges, that will be the end of it and no further appeal is required. If the prosecution decides to retry the case, defendants may appeal the entry of the a mistrial by the Presiding Judge.

What is interesting here is that the jury verdict was read in court, indicating acquittals and upon polling the jury after the reading of the verdict(which is standard) some jurors changed their minds about the vote they cast making up the verdict in the sealed envelope.

Because the trial judge sealed the verdict in an envelope for an extended period of time and allowed the jurors to be exposed to outside influences before it was read, that may very well be judicial misconduct(even if inadvertant, or if caused by illness, etc) and might make for an interesting argument on the prohibition against 'double jeopardy.'

IT is the first time I ever heard of a judge sealing a jury verdict and not reading it for this long a time. Very unusual, and the trial judge should be examined as to the reasons for taking this unconventional step in a complex and contentious trial.

[Chulanowa]

4. I'm not that up to snuff on the case...

But the primary witness, the Israeli secret agent, cannot stand at the trial. So then is this not just a case of the prosecution telling these people to prove they're not guilty, rather than trying to prove that they are? Or is this one of those newfangled "special cases" trials where such things as presumption of innocence and facing one's accuser are "optional?"

[McCamy Taylor]

5. Yep. This trial was right out of Kafka, all the way to the end.

Here is a local cloumnist, Bob Ray Sanders' take on the trial and the ethics of letting unsequestered jurors change their minds.

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/columnists/bob_ray_sanders//story/278485.html

Thanks to some jurors in a Dallas courtroom who refused to bow to religious bigotry and political pressure, a miscarriage of justice was prevented from running its full, destructive course this week.

After years of investigations, weeks of testimony on 197 charges and 19 days of deliberations, the men and women who heard the case against the Holy Land Foundation and five of its leaders proved what many of us had thought from the very beginning: The government's case relied purely on innuendo, guilt by association and widespread prejudice.


<snip>

And when it was announced Thursday that the jury had reached a verdict but that their decision would be sealed until Monday because the judge was out of town, I wondered: So if the men were "not guilty," they had to wait an extra four days? Four hours, maybe, but four days? That didn't seem fair.

As a Tarrant County lawyer explained to a Star-Telegram reporter, those four extra days gave some jurors (who were not sequestered, by the way) a chance to rethink their "not guilty" verdicts, and thus some changed their minds when they got to court on Monday morning.