"Seven months after the shooting, Salman was hit with federal terrorism charges for allegedly aiding and abetting her husband.....From the start, the evidence against Salman was paper-thin and hinged on a “confession” that an FBI agent hand-wrote for her after an 11-hour interrogation in the immediate aftermath of the massacre that was neither filmed nor recorded. Her lawyers maintain the statement was coerced....
"In it, Salman claimed she knew Mateen was headed to Pulse that night, and that they’d scouted the location together. But within a few days of the massacre, the government had reason to believe her statement was false. Based on data from their cell phones, neither Mateen or Salman had ever been in the vicinity of Pulse before. On the night of the attack, Mateen first went to Disney Springs and EVE Orlando ― both of which had heavy, visible security ― before ending up at Pulse after a Google search for “downtown Orlando nightclubs.”....
"The evidence suggested it was a crime of opportunity, the location chosen at random. If Mateen didn’t know where he was going that night, how could his wife have known? How could she, in the words of the June 15, 2016, New York Post cover, “have saved them all”?
"Salman had originally been granted bail by a magistrate judge in California, but prosecutors appealed, asking a federal judge to keep her behind bars. They pointed to her confession that she had scouted Pulse with her husband ― even though by this point they had strong evidence to the contrary ― as a sign she was a danger to society. At the time, Judge Paul Byron sided with the government and kept Salman imprisoned before her trial."
"Salman had originally been granted bail by a magistrate judge in California, but prosecutors appealed, asking a federal judge to keep her behind bars. They pointed to her confession that she had scouted Pulse with her husband ― even though by this point they had strong evidence to the contrary ― as a sign she was a danger to society. At the time, Judge Paul Byron sided with the government and kept Salman imprisoned before her trial."
During the trial, when an FBI agent testified that he had determined “within days” of the massacre that Salman had never been in the vicinity of Pulse, based on her cell phone data, Byron stopped him.
You knew within days? he asked.
Yes, the agent responded.
Did you tell anyone?
Yes, the agent said.
Whom did you tell?
My superiors, the agent replied. Byron asked for their first and last names. Later, after excusing the jury, he asked prosecutors to explain themselves. Why had they misled him when they asked him to deny Salman bail?
“I’m very concerned by that,” Byron said. It seemed he had taken it personally. His decision on Salman’s bail, based in part on faulty information, was responsible for her long separation from her child. By the time of the verdict, Salman had spent 14 months in jail.
The judge’s scolding of the prosecution was perhaps the most dramatic moment in the trial."
"....Although Salman is now free, the human toll of the decision to prosecute her is very real. The trial itself was a kind of punishment.....She missed things, important things, while she was locked up. Her grandmother died during jury selection for the trial; Salman did not get to say her goodbyes or attend the funeral. Most painfully, she was separated from her son for over a year..."
This trial ought, at the very least, make our legal system think seriously about the use of coerced confessions, especially in cases such as this where it was not recorded, obtained after an 11-hour interrogation session, and was hand written by the questioner on a piece of paper.
"....Although Salman is now free, the human toll of the decision to prosecute her is very real. The trial itself was a kind of punishment.....She missed things, important things, while she was locked up. Her grandmother died during jury selection for the trial; Salman did not get to say her goodbyes or attend the funeral. Most painfully, she was separated from her son for over a year..."
This trial ought, at the very least, make our legal system think seriously about the use of coerced confessions, especially in cases such as this where it was not recorded, obtained after an 11-hour interrogation session, and was hand written by the questioner on a piece of paper.
Yep, saw that article earlier today, and conservative friends of mine already are discussing it. It's to HuffPost's credit that it ran the article.
ReplyDeletePart of the conservative political context in all this is that there is already quite a bit distrust in conservative circles toward the Justice Department, the result of concerted efforts by conservative sources to paint the Mueller investigation as a combination fishing expedition, witch hunt and frame-up job by friends of Jim Comey and holdovers from the Obama Administration. This would be a good time for Jeff Sessions to speak up in defense of the integrity and professionalism of his Department - but this story makes it difficult to do so.
The story makes a good point that, whenever there is a shooting, we all look for a narrative. My recent post about the Youtube HQ shooting touches on that as well. FWIW, I don't agree with the contention that the narrative that emerged from the Pulse shooting was "completely wrong" and that "everyone" was misled. Within a week or so of the shooting, Omar Mateen's sympathies with radical Islam had been reported in the media; it's no surprise to me that it probably was the prime motive for the shooting. At the time, it struck me, and probably others (as I'm generally skeptical that any notion I have is original) that the two narratives of radical Islamism and homophobia aren't mutually exclusive. The article makes it reasonable to conclude that the selection of Pulse for the attack wasn't carefully planned. But in the wake of the shooting, those bits of evidence weren't known to the public, and it didn't seem irrational to hypothesize that the attack was homophobic. I'm not thinking immediately of previous shootings that have targeted gays, but goodness knows that physical attacks against people for being gay isn't just the figment of a paranoid imagination.
I happen to think that federal prosecutors have too much power. I had thought so prior to the September 11th attacks. After that, and now with Trump and Sessions in office, it doesn't seem likely that there will be a concerted effort to roll back prosecutorial power and discretion. But this article certainly presents a cautionary tale about unchecked prosecutors.
What I feel they got completely wrong wasn't Mateen's association with radical Islam or his possible homophobia. You're right that those are not mutually exclusive. What I think is wrong is how Noor Salman was kept in jail and denied bail for over a year, separated from her child, on skimpy or nonexistent evidence and a coerced confession. We seem to be losing the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". We also make assumptions that marriage partners have equal power and share all information with each other. That obviously isn't the case in an abusive relationship such as this one proved to be. And contrast Noor's treatment with that of the widow of the Boston bomber. She was investigated, but not arrested. She was also a non-ethnic person from a well-to-do family. Neither was the girlfriend of the Vegas shooter arrested.
DeleteCertainly the FBI got a black eye with this case.
Katherine - you make some great points.
ReplyDeleteWhy would federal investigators and prosecutors get this interrogation and prosecution so wrong? Federal prosecutors are appointed rather than elected in order to shield them from the pressures of public opinion and politics.
Jim, Tell that to Andrew McCabe.
ReplyDeleteRe: interrogation methods; there is a continuum between intensive, lengthy questioning and outright torture to extract information from someone. Torture is increasingly recognized as morally and ethically unacceptable; while intensive, lengthy questioning such as that used on Noor Salman is perhaps less problematic. However, sidestepping the moral issues involved, let's look at it from a practical and pragmatic viewpoint. It got someone to confess to something she didn't do. One would think the purpose of such questioning is to get information that was essential or useful. However it often fails in this regard. The combination of exhaustion, confusion, and suggestion sometimes causes people to doubt their own memories as to what really happened, and may lead them to say what they believe is desired just to make it stop.
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