This is Your Life

One can't help but wonder whether the old television show, This is Your Life, came to mind for anyone in the Moussaoui courtroom on Monday, as the defense began presenting evidence of "mitigating factors" in its effort to stave off a death sentence. Some of the evidence seems to provide legitimate considerations for the jury in the grave decision that awaits it. For one, a psychologist who had interviewed Moussaoui on numerous occassions testified that the defendant suffers from schizophrenia (though we may wonder, if he is a paranoid schizophrenic, why has he even been determined fit to stand trial). Some family testimony also seems to speak to Moussaoui's mental fitness. A clinical social worker discussed the long history of mental illness in the Moussaoui family, explaining that when she interviewed Moussaoui's father in a mental institution, he was incoherent due to heavy medication. Jurors and Moussaoui were shown videotapes of his two sisters, both also institutionalized for mental illness.

But the evidence about Moussaoui's background did not stop there. The social worker described his father's violent tendencies; that Moussaoui was placed in orphanages intermittently for the first six years of his life; that his father used starvation as a method of control. Myriad childhood and teenage friends testified, either in person or by videotape, stating that Moussaoui had been a loyal friend, that he and a Jewish friend used to believe they "exemplified the possibility of two people of different origins to come together to have an understanding." The jury even learned of Moussaoui's six year relationship with a French woman, who he had hoped to marry, but for her family's objections to his Moroccan origins.

Unfortunately for the defense, no personal horror story could live up to the emotional show put on by the prosecution the week before. The jury was presented with an entire week of "victim impact" testimony, in which scenes of airplanes hitting the World Trade Center were replayed, along with final phone calls to 911 from people trapped in the buildings, and a tearful narration of the 9/11 footage by a woman who filmed the whole disaster. One policeman, whose wife died in the attacks, testified about all the things his son would not be able to do with his mother. Another woman described how her young son suffered motivational problems ever since his father died in the Pentagon attack. Giuliani testified that he remembers some part of September 11th "every day." Descriptions of last week's courtroom proceedings read like an account of group therapy or a collective catharsis.

Though both victim impact testimony and evidence of mitigating factors are a standard aspect of criminal procedure, they are on unique display in the Moussaoui trial, which threatens to make clear just what a disfiguration of the judicial process they represent. In the victim impact/mitigating factors analysis, the focus is shifted from the careful legal assessment of responsibility, and--intentionally--the courtroom door is opened to a parade of social and emotional factors, with questionable relevance to the criminal act, that can sway the jury to harden or soften its heart.

Because the Moussaoui trial has never been about holding this particular defendant accountable for his specific crimes, the scope of these fuzzy factors is broader than ever. The trial has, from the outset, been geared toward vindicating the government's prosecution of the war on terror and providing a theater for vengeance. Thus the prosecution reached wildly, managing to hold Moussaoui responsible not only for an attack in which he never planned to take part, but also for the deaths that resulted. And therefore, any and all tragic stories of September 11th were deemed relevant to the jury's determination of whether Moussaoui should suffer the death penalty for (don't forget) withholding information from FBI interrogators. An observer would have been forgiven for assuming that the hijackers were on trial, or even, all of Al-Qaeda.

After the defense's social worker presented the harrowing tale of Moussaoui's childhood, the prosecutor asked her about Moussaoui's brother. Did he not also suffer the same difficult family life? Why, then, had he not also become a terrorist? Now, the prosecutor appeared to be putting on trial the whole notion of "mitigating factors." And the prosecution seemed to be asking the right questions--of what possible relevance is Moussaoui's childhood, riddled with abuse, or his long love affair with a French woman, for that matter, to his criminal sentencing? But since the trial seems to have long since lost sight of what exactly Moussaoui did, or in what ways he acted criminally, it is anyone's guess what relevance means.