{"id":430,"date":"2005-12-07T06:49:30","date_gmt":"2005-12-07T10:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=430"},"modified":"2005-12-07T06:49:30","modified_gmt":"2005-12-07T10:49:30","slug":"al-arian-trial-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=430","title":{"rendered":"Al-Arian trial end"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Along with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/search\/sami+al-arian\">other bloggers<\/a>, I&#8217;ll say a few words about the end of the (first) trial of Sami Al-Arian and his co-defendants after the jump.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\n<ul>\n<li>As the more rabid bloggers have noted, the prosecutors <em>were<\/em> incompetent, dragging the trial along without clearly connecting the dots for the jury.\n<li>The prosecutors&#8217; incompetence may have saved Judge James Moody from the embarrassment of having convictions overturned on appeal because of <em>his<\/em> decisions.  If I remember correctly, he let the prosecutors introduce Alisa Flatow&#8217;s death in a terrorist bombing before they had established a link from the defendants to that incident.\n<li>The result of this trial does not mean that Al-Arian is innocent. The American system of jurisprudence has no checkbox for <em>innocence<\/em>, only <em>guilty<\/em> or <em>not guilty<\/em>. We often interpret the latter as a sign of innocence, but that&#8217;s not technically what happens. And comments that jurors made to reporters yesterday indicated that they just weren&#8217;t convinced that there was a clear intentional connection between fundraising by the defendants and specific acts of terror by the Islamic Jihad. Apparently they didn&#8217;t focus much on attorney Moffitt&#8217;s arguments about free speech, or at least not directly.<\/ul>\n<p><P>So what of Al-Arian and USF? The result of this trial does not justify USF&#8217;s firing of Al-Arian&#151;but the trial&#8217;s value as an external judgment of the actions of USF administrators is minimal, as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/000343.html\">I&#8217;ve written before<\/a>. And several things would have to happen before Al-Arian&#8217;s pending grievance is resolved: He&#8217;d have to get out of jail, not be in deportation proceedings, and decide he wants his job back. Since there are 9 charges still pending, and the reputation of the Justice Department&#8217;s anti-terrorism prosecution effort is at stake, I agree with the observer (whose name I forget&#151;I read a bunch of stories in a blur this morning) who said that the Justice Department is stuck with the case until the (likely bitter) end, and then they&#8217;re stuck with attempting to deport Al-Arian.  One of his codefendants, Sameeh Hammoudeh (a sometime USF grad student), was judged not guilty but had already agreed to be deported if not convicted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Along with other bloggers, I&#8217;ll say a few words about the end of the (first) trial of Sami Al-Arian and his co-defendants after the jump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-freedom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-6W","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}