Hurray For The Jury

I was pleased by this: Moussaoui Given Life Term by Jury

I know some of the 9/11 families are deeply disappointed, even outraged, and Peggy Noonan and others are arguing that Moussaoui is a veritable poster child for the death penalty: if not him, who?. But to me this seems right at two levels.

First, Moussaoui didn't have anything to do with 9/11. The only theory the government could come up with to justify a death sentence was that, had he not lied to federal agents, the government might have tumbled to the plot in time to prevent it. That seems unlikely. But more to the point, lying to federal officers is not a capital offense. It wasn't Moussaoui they were trying to execute but Al Queda. Moussaoui himself just didn't do anything that would warrant a death penalty. He was just a symbol. Since the government won't actually prosecute the guys that really did have something to do with the plot, they went after the non-entity, the wannabe, the cheerleader. Executing a person for what his friends did is not something we should be doing.

But beyond that, the The Slow Rot at Supermax is a far more fitting punishment than "martyrdom" in any event. I actually think the whole trial was a mistake. Once he pled guilty to every charge leveled at him, the government should have simply closed the book and sent him off to solitary for the rest of his life. The trial gave Moussaoui what he wanted most: notoriety and a world-wide audience for his filth. It also made him far more important that he really was. A death penalty would have simply compounded this mistake, since an inevitably high profile execution at the hands of the infidel is doubtless the very thing Moussaoui wanted most in the world. Denying him that and instead condemning him to spend 60 or so years in anonymous solitary confinement is, to me, exactly the right penalty for this piece of human detritus.

Update: In passing sentence on Moussaoui, Judge Brinkema got it exactly right, I think: "You came here to be a martyr and to die in a big bang of glory," Brinkema said. "But to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, you will die with a whimper." One can hardly imagine a more fitting end.