Several years ago, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was apprehended “exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.” That turned out to be false; there was no such plan.
Shortly thereafter, the Bush administration said Padilla was involved with a terrorist plot to blow up apartments. That was false as well; no such plot existed.
From there, the administration said Padilla was actually involved in some kind of terrorist conspiracy to commit jihad in Bosnia and Chechnya. And after three and a half years of detention, abuse, and torture, Padilla stood trial on these charges in Miami. Today, a jury convicted him.
The jury in the Jose Padilla terror trial has convicted the American on charges of conspiracy to support Islamic terrorism overseas. The verdict came after less than two days of deliberations, according to a U.S. District Court official. Padilla and two co-defendants were convicted on all counts.
Padilla pleaded not guilty. At his trial, defense attorneys argued Padilla went overseas only to study Islam.
During the trial, prosecutors played more than 70 intercepted phone calls among the defendants for jurors, including seven that featured Padilla, 36. He is a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam originally arrested as a suspect in a “dirty bomb” plot.
Padilla’s attorneys, who did not offer a defense, argued that their client traveled to the Middle East, but was working on providing aid to persecuted Muslims in war zones. Prosecutors insisted that Padilla’s interests were not humanitarian. “He provided himself to al-Qaida for training to learn to murder, kidnap and maim,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Frazier in closing arguments.
The jury, which was not aware of Padilla’s torture, was obviously persuaded by the prosecution and deliberated very quickly.
It’s worth remembering, though, that this case has not exactly inspired confidence in the criminal justice system as it relates to Americans accused of terrorism.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick explained earlier this year that Padilla was kept for 1,307 days in a 9-foot-by-7-foot cell in a Navy brig in South Carolina, “where he says he was, among other things, deprived of sleep, light, sight, sound, shackled in stress positions, injected with ‘truth serum,’ and isolated for extended stretches of time.” This, not surprisingly, drove him mad, though prosecutors said he was faking mental illness. (Jack Balkin said a while back, “You can’t believe Padilla when he says we tortured him because he’s crazy from all the things we did to him.”)
Lithwick added:
So, what happened to Padilla in those many months of quasi-abusive solitary confinement is legally relevant only if the court determines that he is, right now, too damaged to understand the charges against him or aid in his defense. And not surprisingly, it has come down to a battle of the experts. As of today, two defense experts have testified that Padilla suffers from shattering post-traumatic stress disorder, facial tics, and Stockholm syndrome, which has him protecting the government and fearing his own attorneys. (He has been described by some prison staff as behaving like “a piece of furniture.”)
The prosecution’s expert, on the other hand, vows that Padilla’s mental health problems are relatively minor and in no way impede his ability to stand trial. (So far my very favorite line from the various psychological evaluations of Padilla is this unironic note: “He does believe that he is being persecuted by the government, and he does demonstrate some paranoia about the government, but this does not appear to be delusional.”) The prosecution’s other claims range from laughable to horrifying: Padilla is alternately “malingering,” faking so he doesn’t have to stand trial; or his mental illness is a result of his own history of drug abuse; or he is clearly capable of assisting his lawyers, because he managed to tell them he’d been abused in confinement. Most unnervingly, they assert that the abuse he suffered — which they can’t quite bring themselves to deny — is “irrelevant to the criminal case against him.” […]
This abuse has been futile — aimed at the wrong man and carried out for years. It has tainted the entire Padilla trial and degraded those who did the abusing. It has alienated our former allies and undermined basic principles of humane conduct. And yet the government now claims it is “irrelevant.”
Prosecutors got their conviction, and the jury was persuaded by what they heard. But in this case, no one won and everyone lost.