| Ain't gonna happen. Mookie is going to end up with life in prison. |
At the very least, the prosecutors argued they should be allowed to present a newly designated aviation security witness who had no contact with the offending lawyer, Carla J. Martin of the Transportation Security Administration. They said this would ``allow us to present our complete theory of the case, albeit in imperfect form.'' ``The public has a strong interest in seeing and hearing it (aviation security evidence), and the court should not eliminate it from the case, particularly not ... where other remedies are available,'' they wrote Brinkema.
| Perhaps they should have taken care not to violate the judge's rules and the federal code of procedure. Just a thought when you're getting ready to argue a really important case. |
The sentencing trial that began last week will determine whether he is executed or spends life in prison without possibility of release. Brinkema has delayed the trial until Monday while prosecutors appeal.
Prosecutors argued the sanctions imposed Tuesday were unnecessarily severe. The judge barred several key witnesses from testifying as punishment for the government's misconduct. Brinkema's sanctions make it ``impossible for us to present our theory of the case to the jury,'' the prosecutors said, adding that the barred testimony ``is one of the two essential and interconnected components of our case.''
They also emphasized that six witnesses improperly coached by Martin testified at an evidentiary hearing Tuesday that their testimony would not be influenced by her actions.
| Horseshit. Of course they'll be influenced, and if their testimony is allowed the defense a near sure-fire winner on appeal. Then we get to do this all over again. |
They say these measures combined would have prevented at least one death that day on which nearly 3,000 were killed as three hijacked jetliners were flown into the buildings and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. This is crucial to the government case because to get a death penalty prosecutors must show an action of Moussaoui's - his lies, in this case - led directly to at least one death on 9/11.
| This presumes that the government would have acted sprightly upon hearing the pearls of wisdom from Mookie's lips. We all know better. He could have given them dates, names and locations and nothing would have happened. And to presume that the FAA would have done anything at all is to stand up in court and sound stooopid. |
In their compromise proposal, prosecutors suggested they would drop efforts to argue the Federal Aviation Administration would have barred small knives, like those used by the hijackers, from planes and would have altered its terrorist screening profiles to catch the terrorists. Instead, they would call one witness, whom they did not identify, who worked at the FAA in August 2001 and could discuss the government's use of ``no-fly'' lists to bar specific, named terrorists from planes and how those lists evolved over the years.
Prosecutors have acknowledged they may have no viable case if Brinkema's ruling stands. ``We don't know whether it is worth us proceeding at all, candidly, under the ruling you made today,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Rob Spencer said in an unusually blunt assessment during a conference call Tuesday. Spencer went on to say that resuming the trial under these conditions would ``waste the jury's time and the court's time, and we're all mindful of the expense of this proceeding.''
| Yup. Put Mookie in jail for life and then fire Martin for her idiocy. |
Martin coached witnesses on their testimony, sent them trial transcripts that she urged them to read and warned them to be prepared for certain topics on cross-examination. That violated trial rules preventing witnesses from being exposed to trial proceedings so that they do not alter their testimony based on what they learn. She also misrepresented to defense lawyers that witnesses they wanted to call weren't willing to talk with them before trial.
| She should be disbarred for this, but my bet is she won't be punished at all. |
Eric Holder, a former deputy attorney general, said in an interview Wednesday he expected prosecutors to exhaust all options pursuing the case. ``Agree or disagree with the decision to seek death, once you have committed to that course of action, you have to do all that you can to obtain that ultimate punishment.''