Padilla verdict may cast a long shadow

When jurors announce their verdict in the trial of Jose Padilla, they could be seen as either endorsing the government’s long detention of Padilla or questioning the controversial policy of keeping so-called “enemy combatants” in military jails.

“If the verdict comes back guilty, the government is going to say, ‘We were right all along,’ ” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C. “I think a not-guilty verdict would be a very interesting prospect.”

After three months of testimony in a Miami federal court, an attorney for Padilla made closing arguments Tuesday. Jurors are set to begin deliberations today. Padilla, 36, and Kifah Wael Jayyousi and Adham Amin Hassoun, both 45, are charged with conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country and providing material support to terrorists. If convicted, each could be sentenced to life in prison.

The case has drawn worldwide attention because Padilla, a U.S. citizen and former Broward County, Fla., resident, was labeled an “enemy combatant” by the United States and held without charges in a U.S. Navy brig for 3 1/2 years after his 2002 arrest. At the time of his arrest, U.S. officials accused him of taking part in a plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb,” but they never charged him with that crime.

In 2005, federal prosecutors added him to the indictment against Hassoun, a former Sunrise, Fla., computer programmer, and Jayyousi, a former school administrator in Detroit and Washington.

Padilla was charged just as the U.S. Supreme Court was considering whether to hear for a second time his claim that his military detention without access to lawyers was unconstitutional. The claim was narrowly dismissed the first time on technical grounds. The government’s move led the Supreme Court to decide 6-3 against hearing his case a few months after the indictment.

The fact that Padilla was tried in the civilian court is a victory, said Vladeck, who worked on briefs opposing Padilla’s military detention.

“From the point of the American criminal justice system, the most important thing is not the result, but that it happened,” he said. “This is how the system is supposed to work.”

No evidence about or from Padilla’s detention in military custody was presented to the jury.

His attorneys had argued that Padilla’s time in the brig amounted to torture and left him with severe mental problems. But U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke, who presided over the trial, declared Padilla competent and declined to throw out the case despite a defense motion saying his detention and interrogations violated his due process rights.

She said he could receive a fair trial as long as the government did not introduce evidence obtained in the interrogations.

Prosecutors said that Padilla was a willing “star recruit” of a South Florida terrorist support cell and that he wanted to fight “violent jihad,” going as far as training in an Al Qaeda camp. According to prosecutors, Hassoun raised funds for violent Islamic groups and Jayyousi raised money and published terrorist propaganda.

The backbone of the case against the men is dozens of wiretapped phone calls that were played in court. Padilla’s voice was heard on seven of the conversations.

The key piece of evidence against Padilla is a document prosecutors say he filled out to attend an Al Qaeda training camp. The document has biographical information that matches Padilla’s and it has his fingerprints on it, prosecutors said.

Michael T. Caruso, a federal public defender representing Padilla, attacked that evidence on Tuesday, saying the document “raises more questions than answers.”

He said the fingerprints on the application are consistent with someone who handled the form, not someone who filled it out, and there were at least three different types of handwriting on the form.

He also said a palm print on the form was probably made by the person who signed it but was not analyzed by the government to determine if it belonged to Padilla.

Caruso said the government failed to prove that Padilla, a Muslim convert, was a radical extremist who plotted cold-blooded murder, a charge at the center of the case.

Padilla traveled to the Middle East in 1998 to study Arabic and Islam, he said.

“His intent was to study, not to murder,” Caruso said.