Dirtball Tactics in GWoT

The occupied Department of Justice is running up an impressive record in its struggles to find a victim in the GWoT. It has failed abysmally several times.

The prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation in Richardson, TX, evidently pulled a very shady trick on the accused, and tried to persuade jurors in their deliberations by sending into the jury room inadmissible evidence.

Last week, the defense asked Judge Solis to hold a hearing "for the purpose of probing the prosecutors' motives and obtaining other testimony relevant to the issues" in reference to the extra materials in the jury room.

During two months of testimony last year, jurors saw nearly all of the materials in question, including charts, documents, photographs and videos. U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish, now in semiretirement, told jurors to consider them only as aids in navigating the mountain of evidence in the complex case, and not as established fact.
(snip)
The defense team discovered that the materials had made it into the jury room while debriefing jurors after the tumultuous Oct. 22 mistrial, in which jurors could not all agree on the verdicts.

The problem was alluded to on the fourth day of deliberations. On Sept. 26, the forewoman sent out a note saying that one juror thought some demonstrative exhibits were in the jury room. Prosecutors told the judge that was not the case, prompting the judge to send back a note telling jurors that everything in the room with them was evidence and to keep deliberating.

"This gave considerable ammunition to the jurors favoring conviction who said that these exhibits proved that the defendants were guilty," the forewoman told attorneys, according to an affidavit filed May 30 with the dismissal motion. (Emphasis added.)

The jury was told to regard as evidence those materials which had been excluded because they were not true. The judge let the prosecutors' advertisements be used as evidence, much like the recently excluded exhibits a Federal Judge refused to accept with respect to Gitmo defendants, no more than saying something was true because the government said it was true three times, the Hare-brained, I mean Lewis Carroll, case.

This trial has been farcical from the beginning, trying to show that assistance given some Muslim charities, before they were declared to be terrorist organizations, made the Holy Land Foundation a terrorist operation. This country, and most particularly its Department of Justice, should engage in the pursuit of justice, not obstruction of it.

This is a sorry executive branch, and it only furthers terrorism.