Washington: A lone juror in the US court that tried Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, stood firmly opposed to handing him the death penalty, leading the jury to sentence the al-Qaeda plotter to life imprisonment.
The foreman of the jury said the panel voted 11 to 1, 10 to 2 and 10 to 2 in favour of the death penalty on three terrorism charges for which Moussaoui was eligible for execution.
For an execution to proceed, the jury needed a unanimous vote.
The foreman, a Northern Virginia math teacher, said deliberations reached a critical point on the third day, when the process nearly broke down.
Frustrations built because of the repeated 11 to 1 votes on one charge without any dissenting arguments during discussions, she told the Washington Post, which did not identify her by name.
All the ballots were anonymous, and the other jurors were relying on the discussions to identify the holdout.
"Wednesday (April 26) was a very intense day," she said. "But there was no yelling. It was as if a heavy cloud of doom had fallen over the deliberation room, and many of us realised that all our beliefs and our conclusions were being vetoed by one person."
"I felt frustrated, because I felt that many of us had been cheated by the anonymity of the 'no' voter," she said.
The foreman said she voted for the death penalty because the government proved its case.
Comments
0 comment