US: 1 juror kept Moussaoui alive

WASHINGTON – Only one juror stood between the death penalty and al-Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in the United States in connection with the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September 2001, the Washington Post reported Friday.

The lone juror frustrated his colleagues because he never explained his vote, according to the foreman of the jury that sentenced Moussaoui to life in prison last week.

According to the American law, a death penalty sentence requires a unanimous vote of all 12 jurors. The foreman, a Northern Virginia math teacher, said in an interview that the panel voted 11 to 1, 10 to 2 and 10 to 2 in favor of the death penalty on three terrorism charges for which Moussaoui was eligible for execution. A unanimous vote on any one of them would have resulted in a death sentence.

The foreman said deliberations reached a critical point on the third day, when the process nearly broke down. Frustrations built because of the repeated 11 to 1 votes on one charge without any dissenting arguments during discussions. All the ballots were anonymous, and the other jurors were relying on the discussions to identify the holdout.

"Wednesday (April 26) was a very intense day," she said. "But there was no yelling. It was as if a heavy cloud of doom had fallen over the deliberation room, and many of us realized that all our beliefs and our conclusions were being vetoed by one person... We tried to discuss the pros and cons. But I would have to say that most of the arguments we heard around the deliberation table were in favor of the death penalty."

The foreman said deliberations broke off April 26 when one juror questioned why they should take another vote. "What for?" the foreman remembers the juror saying, "We all know how it is going to come out."

The next day a juror called in sick, and there were no deliberations. That Friday, the jury returned. The foreman told the group that she wanted to send a note to US District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema stating that the jury was "not holding deliberations in the true sense of deliberations because the con arguments were not being thrown out on the table so we could investigate them as a group."

'Cheated by anonymity'

She said the jurors did not want any notes sent to the judge, so they decided that the whole group would raise anti-death penalty issues because that way the lone dissenter would not feel isolated or "ganged up on." Deliberations continued, but the foreman said the lone dissenter still did not raise any issues. Three days later, jurors delivered their decision to Brinkema.

The foreman said at the end of the deliberations she felt better about the process but not the outcome.

"I felt frustrated," she said, "because I felt that many of us had been cheated by the anonymity of the 'no' voter. We will never know their reason. We will never be able to hold their reason up to the light and the scrutiny of evidence, fact and law."

Moussaoui, 37, pleaded guilty last year to taking part in a broad al-Qaeda conspiracy to crash planes into US buildings. Moussaoui, a French citizen, testified that he had planned to fly a fifth hijacked airplane into the White House on September 11.