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Originally Posted by innerSpaceman
The death penalty is not suddenly on the table when the verdict is in. It is part and parcel of the crimes the defendant is charged with, not found guilty of. There was one point where the judge was going to take it off the table because of government witness tampering, but ultimately the prosecution was able to produce new witnesses.
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Not so. Moussaoui plead guilty, so there was never a trial to determine guilt. There were instead 2 phases in the court. The first was to determine if the crimes he plead guilty to were enough to warrant the death penalty as an option, and the second was, once the possible penalties were decided, to decide which penalty he'd get.
As for my feeling that he was not as involved as he and the government said...most observers of the trial (including families of 9/11 victims) were saying it through the whole trial, people who actually knew Moussaoui were saying it in testimony, and now the jurors who made the decission are saying it. I didn't see every detail, but every shred I did see pointed to someone with massive dillusions of grandeur and a government that desperately wanted to say, "If only he
told us, we could have stopped it," which is a load of crap.