Having been sentenced to life in prison, Zacarias Moussaoui will disappear from public view. With his two- phase trial finally over, he loses the public forum in which he’s vented his venom against the United States.
Had prosecutors won the death penalty they sought, a lengthy appeals process might have given Moussaoui additional opportunities to grab public attention. As it is, he’ll be able to rave only to the walls of his small, nearly featureless prison cell.
The sentence was a just ending to the highly publicized case. The jury that decided the sentence had to weigh extensive and emotional evidence, both about the victims of Sept. 11 and Moussaoui’s troubled past.
Some family members of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks testified in favor of the death penalty, but others told the federal court in Virginia that the best outcome would be if Moussaoui were “put away forever.”
It isn’t known how many jurors wanted Moussaoui sentenced to life and how many wanted a death sentence. In death-penalty cases, federal law requires an automatic life sentence if a jury is split. The 42-page verdict form didn’t indicate how, or if, the jury split.
The jury apparently rejected two key defense arguments: that Moussaoui suffers a mental illness and that he would become a martyr if executed. No jurors indicated on the form that they gave weight to those arguments.
We believe Moussaoui was a bit player in the Sept. 11 attacks, not the key figure prosecutors (and Moussaoui) tried to portray. In jail on that tragic day, Moussaoui could have told investigators what he knew about the conspiracy, and his refusal justifies the life sentence.
Moussaoui’s bravado – the shouts and insults he hurled before being led away – will fade once he hears the cold metal door slam behind him, reportedly at the federal prison in Florence. The ultra maximum-security unit, nicknamed Supermax, could be called “death’s twilight kingdom.” He will be locked in a small cell 23 hours a day and won’t have human contact even during the one hour of exercise he’ll be allowed. It could be a long stay; Moussaoui is only 37.
U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema was right when, paraphrasing a famous poem, she said Moussaoui will “die with a whimper.” She also could have used the same T.S. Eliot poem to describe Moussaoui’s courtroom rant as “meaningless as wind in dry grass.”
Rather than lasting fame, Moussaoui will be remembered, if at all, only as one of “the hollow men.”
