Breaking: Mistrial Declared in HLF Hamas Trial - Update: Official Verdict Document Added
Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 9:42:19 am PDT
Holy Land trial ends in mistrial.
11:35 a.m. The Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial ended in a mistrial Monday after the jurors deadlocked on most of the counts. But a government prosecutor said the Justice Department would retry the case.
Only one official – Mohammad El-Mezain, the Holy Land’s original chairman and endowments director — was acquitted on most of the counts by a unanimous jury. But he could still face prosecution on a charge of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism.
Another official — Mufid Abdulqader, a top Holy Land fundraiser and former Dallas public works supervisor — was originally found not guilty on most of the charges in the verdict rendered Thursday and unsealed Monday.
Abdulrahman Odeh, the foundation’s New Jersey representative, was found not guilty on most of the charges in the verdict rendered Thursday and unsealed Monday.
The jury was hung on the other counts. But when polled, some jurors told the judge that they did not agree with the verdicts on Mr. El-Mezain and Mr. Odeh, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial.
UPDATE at 10/22/07 10:09:55 am:
Here’s the verdict, in PDF form.
The official word from the US District Court in Dallas:
The jury has found Defendant Mohammad El-Mezain NOT GUILTY on Counts 2-32. Chief Judge Fish has declared a mistrial as to Count 1 for this defendant and on all counts for each of the remaining defendants.
UPDATE at 10/22/07 10:37:57 am:
Debbie Schlussel saw this coming.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you about this. I predicted the Justice Department would lose their case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Muslim charity that financed HAMAS in concert with CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and virtually every mainstream American Islamic group. And, sadly, I was right.
This morning, the HLF defendants were acquitted on many charges, and on the rest the jury was not unanimous, which means a hung jury—yet another victory for these blantant terrorist financiers. The judge declared a mistrial on those counts, but the fact that the majority of those jurors polled voted for acquittal says all we need to know. We lost, they won. And our “warriors” in the courtroom stink.
UPDATE at 10/22/07 12:09:36 pm:
Rod Dreher was in the courtroom when the verdicts were read and the mistrial declared: Holy Land Foundation snafu.
The thing I kept hearing was that the information in the government’s case was pretty damning, but that the narrative was so complex that even the sharpest jurors would have had trouble making sense of it. According to my sources, this jury was as glazed as a dozen Krispy Kremes throughout most of the testimony. When they walked into the courtroom this morning, I saw a jury that, in its manner of dress and presentation, was clearly a blue-collar jury. I understood then what one source of mine who’d sat through some of the testimony told me weeks ago: That this is like expecting his elderly grandmother from a tiny country town to sit through a graduate-level seminar in modern Mideast politics, and to make sense of it.
Anyway, it was a bad day for the government, but this story is not over yet. There is a retrial to come. The government is going to have to do something about its strategy, though. Moreover, a lot of useful information came out of this trial, particularly about how the Muslim Brotherhood runs the show among the US Muslim community’s main organizations. This is by no means trifling information.
Frank says:
