Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Juror removed from Lodi terror trial

Apparently there is another high profile case experiencing difficulties. (See previous post.) The big trial I'm referring to is Hamid Hayat's terror case in Lodi, CA.

Dave Logan, aka Third Wave Dave reports that juror Andrea Clabaugh has been removed from the panel because she disclosed that years ago she dated a deputy sheriff.

No big deal....

But this is what Clabaugh told the Sacramento (free registration required) Bee:

Beyond a reasonable doubt hasn't been proven at this point," Clabaugh, 39, said in a hallway interview with reporters.

The government is nearing the end of its case.

Prosecution of the 23-year-old Hayat is built primarily on a videotaped admission to FBI agents that he attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and initially lied about it when questioned by agents, and on secretly recorded conversations he had with Naseem Khan, an FBI informant.

"I felt like he was being badgered" by FBI agents, Clabaugh said of the confession. "I felt like he was giving them information because they refused to believe he didn't know anything. It seemed like he was fed names by the agents. It didn't seem like Hamid actually volunteered anything."

The most surprising revelation of the trial has been the testimony by Khan that al-Qaeda's second-in-command, erstwhile pediatrician Ayman Al-Zawahiri, lived in Lodi in the 1990s, although the defense disputes that allegation.

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