jks writes:
>Not unusual with survivors of traumatic events.
Sure, but the deputy's testimony changed markedly over time--in ways which made it obvious that these were not memories but new constructions. He said early on that the assailant had grey eyes, which was what was on the warrant they were trying to serve on Al-Amin, but unfortunately for the prosecution the warrant was wrong. Later he said the assailant was wearing yellow-tinted glasses (explaining the discrepancy between the reported eye color and Al-Amin's actual eye color.) Maybe the jury knew that the deputy, Aldranon English, was making stuff up but forgave him cause he'd been badly injured and traumatized.
>> Juries tend to believe cops if they have no direct
>> experience with how cops
>> lie on the stand.
>
>Right, but this isn't a standard testilying case. "He
>dropped the drugs right in front of me."
It had its moments. For example, there was the shell that supposedly rode unmolested on the car hood on the freeway for three hours ('he found the shell right in front of me') and the guns 'found' in the woods ('he dropped the guns--sorta--right in front of me'). And English said the assailant fired first, while two witnesses testified they heard pistol fire before the assault rifle (nobody argued that the assailant used the small gun at first.)
> To acquit you'd have to believe
>> the guns were planted and
>> the defense suggested that but was not really able
>> to make a strong enough
>> case for it.
>
>Yeah, you have to be able to prove that. the guns were
>pretty overwhelming evidence, the cop's testimony
>aside.
>
>>There was a lot of veiled
>> Muslim-bashing (to a mostly black
>> mostly Christian jury). There were no other
>> suspects, and the general
>> feeling that 'someone must pay.'
>
>But the case was a lot stronger than that.
I think they successfully made the case that he had something to do with it, and may have known who did it, but *not* that he was the shooter. Did you follow it in the Atlanta paper? That's about the only place there was substantial coverage.
> Al-Amin didn't
>> take the stand and that
>> didn't help.
>
>It's virtually impossible, at least in federal court,
>for a criminal defendant to be completely acquitted
>unless he takesthe stand and says convincingly, "I
>didn't do it." And generally not even then. Mostly
>because it isn't convincing.
He denied it in the press before the trial. It was implied that he didn't take the stand because he didn't want to give information that might lead to the prosecution of another person. Which would be a pretty strong moral-political stand, if you're the victim of a frame-up, to not reward the frame-up machine that's doing you. Indeed, some guy in Colorado confessed to the shooting and then retracted the confession-sort of. Of course, the police didn't spend a minute on the idea that the assailant might NOT be Al-Amin, despite three 911 calls about a bloodied person or persons wandering around the West End area later the night of the shoot-out.
>What makes this case so odd is that it's hard to see
>the defendant's motivation--that's not an element, but
>he'd have to have gone nuts to do something like that.
If it was Al-Amin, or Al-Amin and someone else, in my view it had to be the product of some kind of provocation, such as he was told someone was coming to kill him. Or, as the two witnesses said they heard, the cops fired first.
>He wasn't your usual lowlife cop killer. That's why it
>seems that he should have been innocent. But to
>believe that in the face of the evidence of the guns,
>you have to believe that the guns were planted. The
>cops are not above that, as we know too well here in
>Illinois, but it's hard to accept on merely a priori
>grounds.
Sure, the prosecution and defense agreed not to introduce Al-Amin's previous record or politics, nor the history of police harassment. To that extent, Carrol's right, the defense chose a non-political trial, very much in keeping with everything I've heard and read about Al-Amin's current views. And without the political history, a juror would naturally wonder why the cops would go to all the trouble of framing him. In the only phase where the political history was mentioned, sentencing, the jury backed off from the guillotine.
>Too damn bad, guilty or not.
The people at the Community Mosque were, of course, devastated by the verdict. Whatever else you can say, these folks have created a dignified, relatively safe neighborhood in the middle of an embattled slum. You don't do that without creating enemies.
Jenny Brown