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Some Saw Moussaoui As Bit Player, Juror Says
Abraham Scott, left, Lisa Dolan and Rosemary Dillard, who lost spouses in the Sept. 11 attacks, leave the courthouse in Alexandria with a U.S. marshal. "You have wrecked my life," Dillard told Zacarias Moussaoui at his sentencing.
(By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)
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It was precisely Moussaoui's testimony -- when the Sept. 11 conspirator took the stand and gleefully said he had planned to attack the White House with a crew that included "shoe bomber" Richard Reid -- that convinced one of the jurors that he was embellishing his role.
"The moment he said the name Richard Reid I thought he was lying," the juror said in an interview yesterday. "It seemed like Moussaoui's role in 9/11 was increasing over time."
By order of the court, the jurors were anonymous, although Brinkema told them that they were free to discuss their deliberations if they wished. The juror contacted a Washington Post reporter, who recognized the juror from the trial. He spoke to The Post anonymously because he did not want to be hassled if his name were revealed.
Although he would not give the jury's final vote, he said he felt it was important for people to understand how the nine men and three women methodically arrived at their verdict.
For this juror, the hardest part was the nightmares.
On many sleepless nights, he struggled to block out the voice of the Sept. 11 conspirator, spitting venom at America.
Equally traumatic were his nightmares about the relatives of victims who testified. "It was very difficult to hear. It was like attending one funeral after another for days on end," the juror said. "But we had to move beyond our own emotions and really focus on the law."
Inside the jury room, this juror said, the atmosphere was relaxed. "It was like a college seminar debate class, where every point of view is voiced. There was never any finger-pointing, anyone saying you need to think this way," he said.
In the trial's first phase, jurors quickly found Moussaoui eligible for the death penalty because they focused on the government's argument: that the Sept. 11 attacks could have been stopped if Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI when he was arrested in August 2001.
The jury started by making a list of the five "essential" lies the defendant told FBI agents and then created a timeline "of what was very likely to have happened if he hadn't lied," the juror said. Jurors concluded that FBI agent Harry Samit, who interviewed Moussaoui in Minnesota and testified that his superiors failed to act on his more than 70 warnings that he was a terrorist, would have obtained a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings if the defendant had told the truth about the pending al-Qaeda plot.
That, jurors believed, would have quickly enabled investigators to uncover the plot. "Samit was like a bulldog with a bone. He wouldn't let go," the juror said.
As for the defense's primary first-phase argument -- that the FBI ignored numerous warning signs before Sept. 11 and would have failed to act on Moussaoui's information as well -- the juror said: "The FBI wasn't on trial. Moussaoui was."
