All in the family

As part of their presentation, defense lawyers for madman Zacarias Moussaoui played tapes of his sisters, both of whom are institutionalized in France for schizophrenia.
The defense also called an expert psychiatrist, who concluded that paranoid schnizophrenic Zacarias Moussaoui is, in fact, a paranoid schizophrenic, and the defense called some 9-11 victims’ relatives who evidently do not believe that executing the first Arab we can find is somehow an advancement of divine, or even earthly justice.
For its part, the prosecution noted that at least one of Moussaoui’s brother is not a paranoid schizophrenic, and like, who will they believe… him, or their lying eyes? Further, the prosecution contended that Moussaoui’s irrational beliefs could just be the result of religious fundamentalism of the kind that in America we call “healthy family values…” though when identical levels of irrationality surface in Arabs, we call it eeeeevilllllll.
In other words, what virtually every trial judge in virtually every trial tells the jurors, to wit, judge the case before you on the evidence you see and not with your heart or your emotions or your spleen… is precisely what the government does not want (and does not expect… I don’t either, btw) the jury to do. Rather, someone has got to pay for 9-11, and, well, Moussaoui is a wonderfully convenient bogeyman, who is crazy enough to actually believe the crap he told the jury…
Sadly, the jury will likely believe it as well. And, unless Judge Brinkema follows the law (for which she would likely be reversed by the Imperial Supporters of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond) Mr. Moussaoui will likely be sentenced to death for a crime for which FBI agents have already established in this case that he is not legally responsible (i.e., the testimony was that no matter what evidence of a plot was presented the Bureau’s higher ups were simply inclined not to believe it; there is no reason to assume that anything Moussaoui could have said would have altered that outcome… in short, the Government failed to meet its “beyond a reasonable doubt” burden on this critical point.)
It remains unclear if Moussaoui can be executed before the necessary deadline of January 20, 2009, after which we will, presumably, have a functioning adult in the White House, and hence, the odds of Mr. Moussaoui’s execution will decline precipitously.
But there you go.
Update: Surprise, surprise, but the government has stipulated with the defense that, in fact, there is no evidence at all that Richard Reid was involved in a suicide plot with Moussaoui (as Moussaoui testified in order to buy himself this phase of the death penalty trial). Another legal nail in the coffin of the government’s death penalty case that we can expect to be duly overlooked by jury and judge alike.
Indeed, while Moussaoui was, at one time, part of a broader plot involving training A.Q. members to fly airplanes, it is clear that he was “out of the loop” on September 11th and details of it; he might well have proven a valuable intelligence asset (assuming, of course, that our government ever had any interest in such things as actual intelligence) and had he been played that way… instead, we have elected to make him a scapegoat… because someone’s got to pay for 9-11, after all… and a paranoid schizophrenic delusional Arab who fits the bill and seemingly even wants us to hate him is just too good to pass up.