He is a very frightened 19-year-old. |
He is living in a mud hut in the middle of nowhere with his Koran, his wife, and his child, |
He never said he was responsible because this was something that he did. |
He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. |
I really felt a sense of his pain. He was a person who was wrongly accused at a very difficult time. |
Most of these cases become the battleground for fundamental issues that every defendant has in a criminal case. |
Other than the interpreters' booths, the courtroom has the normal appearance of a multi-defendant trial. |
Several of them had, |
The case certainly has a high level of security unparalleled in my experience of practice in the federal court. |
The concept of blowing up innocent people is not permissible. |
The fact that his family was there and that he traveled with so little clothing, ... to come back. |
These cases teach us, me and you, how important and how cherished the rights are that we have. After all, it is those rights that were under attack. |
They thought they had someone, and they pressed him and pressed him. Civil liberties were put on hold, because the government was dealing with a tragedy of enormous proportions. |
This case had a powerful emotional component and I was concerned that we would not be able to overcome that. |
to stop the carnage and the starvation. |