-
[11] The Day in Court
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
- Additional Information
[11] THE DAY IN COURT The trial of al-’Owhali, Odeh, K. K. Mohamed, and el Hage opened on a blustery February 5, 2001, in the Southern District of New York, courtroom 318 of the Old Federal Courthouse, Foley Square, Manhattan. The building’s architecture conveys the grandeur and stolidity of the law. It had taken nearly a month to select a dozen jurors from a pool of fifteen hundred, the largest ever assembled for a federal criminal trial. With al-’Owhali and K. K. facing the death penalty, it was the first capital case to go before a Manhattan federal jury in nearly a half century. All four defendants pled not guilty. There was no real consideration given to a pretrial plea bargain. The government believed it had already extracted all intelligence of value from al-’Owhali, Odeh, and Mohamed, leaving them nothing to deal. El Hage had resisted cooperation to the point of perjury. “Our office was always amenable to a plea, but it would not have meant agreeing to anything better than life without parole,” shrugged Mary Jo White.1 With the government offering virtually no incentive beyond, perhaps, taking death off the table, the defense had little incentive to plead guilty. And the prosecution was content to go to trial. --For all the formality meant to expunge passion from the proceedings, for all the isolation of fact from opinion, there is no denying the anguish at the heart of a criminal trial. Odeh’s attorney, Anthony Ricco, expressed what some of the jurors were undoubtedly thinking as they contemplated the enormity of the crimes before them: “I’m ready to jump over this bar right now and end this. Trial for who? For them?” He acknowledged the extreme suffering that the case would address and the pain inflicted on the victims and their loved ones. And he recognized that these things couldn’t help but affect the jury. Nonetheless, he appealed to The Day in Court 109 them “to overcome that anger and overcome that bitterness, to keep your minds open to . . . the concept of fairness.” And so al-’Owhali, el Hage, Mohamed, and Odeh entered the courtroom, presumed innocent of the monstrous crimes of which they were accused, to plead their case. The daunting task facing defense counsel was to humanize the defendants. A task exacerbated by their own difficulty winning the trust of their clients. Judge Sand recalls, “What was quite unique, for me, about the case was the relationship between the defendants and their attorneys, who were all extremely able and vigorously defended their clients. But, it was common knowledge to everyone in court that the defendants hated them.”2 He noted how Fredrick Cohn seemed to have particular difficulty with al-’Owhali, pointing out that he was not permitted by his client to make an opening statement. (Interestingly, most of the defenders, in retrospect, at any rate, speak quite positively of their relationship with their clients.) “We had a strange relationship,” Cohn affirmed. “He didn’t trust anyone from the West. From his point of view, we’re part of a system, paid for by the government . And I’m Jewish, though certainly an apostate Jew and, in all candor, anti-Zionist. In any event, I try to stay away from philosophical discussions with my clients. It causes profound trouble, particularly if you disagree. He got along with my associate, Laura Gasiorowski, very well—spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convert her to Islam—and, quite frankly, it was her relationship with him that got us over hurdles when we had difficulties.”3 Gasiorowski still seems rather perplexed at how she succeeded in earning al- ’Owhali’s trust, “I went to the jail every single day. We spoke for hours at a time. It was emotionally draining to spend every day trying to convince him that he could trust us. You’d just go in circles and circles. I read everything I could find to understand who these people were, what it’s like to grow up in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, what al Qaeda was. To grasp what was going on in his head, sitting in a room, maybe for the first time, opposite a woman who was not his mother or his sister. I had to let him educate me, to just listen to him. I think every human being wants to connect with other human beings in whatever circumstances they’re in, and I think that’s what...