Moussaoui Gets Some Unusual Help

As a photo of Rodriguez and his son hiking flashed on television monitors throughout the courtroom, defense lawyer Alan Yamamoto asked: "What was that experience like for the two of you?"

"It was fine for him. He was less than 30 years old," Rodriguez said to laughter, one of numerous times that spectators and jurors smiled.

The testimony culminated an attempt by Moussaoui's lawyers to reach out to victims and relatives. Although their efforts paled in comparison with what prosecutors did -- compiling a database of more than 8,000 names in the largest victim impact program in U.S. history -- several lawyers contacted family members on behalf of the defense.

It is something defense lawyers in capital cases have been doing with more frequency in the years since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed victim impact testimony in 1991. The court had ruled previously that such testimony was prejudicial.

Richard Burr, who defended Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, said McVeigh's defense sent letters to bombing victims but did not seek their testimony before McVeigh was executed in 2001.

"Most of us have the ability to recover from the most grievous of losses. We have the ability to heal," Burr said. "That's the message Moussaoui's defense was trying to send."

Because the Supreme Court decision said family members cannot be asked what the punishment should be, Moussaoui's lawyers were engaging in a delicate legal ballet yesterday, said Barry Boss, a Washington lawyer with experience in capital cases. He said the defense strategy made sense, especially given the damage Moussaoui has done to his case with his testimony.

But it was also "fraught with risk," Boss said, because jurors "tend to view the defense as anti-victim. . . . Anytime you're calling victims, you have to walk a very fine line. These people have already suffered an enormous tragedy."

Defense lawyers treated their witnesses much as prosecutors had done when more than 35 family members and Sept. 11 survivors testified for the government. The defense restricted questions to how loved ones had lived their lives, how they died and what impact the deaths had on the family members.

Although the six relatives who took the stand yesterday did not show the abject grief displayed by the prosecution witnesses, Anthony Aversano did choke up when describing how he decided to reconcile with his estranged father on Sept. 11 -- of 1999. His father, who was not named, died in the trade center attack exactly two years later. "I got my dad back," he said through tears.

Since the attacks, Aversano said, he has decided not to give in to the rage he first felt. "I saw that if I had let myself succumb to fear and anger and vengeance, then more than the planes would have been hijacked that day," he said. ". . . The life I want to live is a life with compassion for other people."