Retrial of Holy Land ends in convictions.
During the trial, defense attorneys accused the government of bending to Israeli pressure to prosecute the charity, and of relying on old evidence. But jurors agreed with the government's contention that at least $12 million raised in the U.S. had been illegally funneled to Hamas after that organization was banned as a terrorist group by the federal government in 1995.
Prosecutors spent more time in the second trial explaining the complexities of the case and painting a clearer picture of the money trail. Following the mistrial, prosecutors streamlined their case and eliminated almost 100 charges against the remaining defendants.
The first trial of the Holy Land Foundation ended in a mistrial on October 22, 2007 when the jurors returned no convictions against any of the five former leaders of the Holy Land. Mohammad El-Mezain, the Holy Land's original chairman, was acquitted on most of the counts by a unanimous jury after 19 days of deliberations.
Tellingly, while prosecutors said the foundation raised money for Hamas they did not accuse the charity of directly financing or being involved in "terrorist" activity. Prosecutors said the charity was spreading Hamas' ideology by funding schools, hospitals and social welfare programs controlled by the group in the Palestinian territories, and permitting it to divert funds to the activities of fighters.
Attorney Greg Westfall, who has been involved in the case since 2005 called the prosecution shameful and compared the 42-day trial to some of the darkest days in American history. Alluding to the statement Richard Roper, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, "This is a great day in the United States. We will not tolerate those who fund terrorism," Westfall said: "Yeah, like Dred Scott was a great day for the United States. Like the 'Red Scare’ was a great day in America." Dred Scott was the 1857 Supreme Court case that declared no slave or descendant of a slave was a citizen of the United States and, therefore, had no right to sue in federal court. In pandering to racial and religious prejudices, Westfall said, the prosecution depended on people accepting the stereotype that "Muslim equals Islamist equals terrorist." It was based mainly on guilt by association, he said, including associations with groups that have never been proven to be "terrorists" or supporters of terrorism.
According to Nancy Hollander, a lawyer from Albuquerque who represented one of the defendants, Shukri Abu-Baker: “Our clients were not even allowed to review their own statements because they were classified — statements that they made over the course of many years that the government wiretapped,” Ms. Hollander said. “They were not allowed to go back and review them. There were statements from alleged co-conspirators that included handwritten notes. Nobody knew who wrote them; nobody knew when they were written. There are a plethora of issues.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, has called the Holy Land case an "example of excessive and vexatious prosecution." The intention was to chill Muslim charities in the U.S., and that is exactly what happened, he said.
List of unindicted co-conspirators created a legal entanglement
and ammunition to anti-Muslim activists.
The Holy Land trial created another legal entanglement with the 11-page list of more than 300 individuals and American Muslim organizations named as “unindicted co-conspirators.” The list was leaked by the Department of Justice to the media.
On August 16, 2007, CAIR filed an amicus brief asking the court to remove its name, and that of several hundred other Muslim individuals and institutions, from a list of so-called “unindicted co-conspirators.” The CAIR brief in part said:
“The Fifth Amendment was violated because the public naming of the unindicted co-conspirators damaged their reputation, good name, and economic well-being, without offering a forum for vindication, and without a legitimate governmental reason for doing so. The First Amendment was violated because the governmental action of publicly naming the unindicted co-conspirators chilled the expressive associational activities of the unindicted co-conspirators and the government does not have a substantially related compelling interest for their action. . . (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
“Undoubtedly, the practice of naming unindicted co-conspirators needs to be proscribed from the outset. Such a practice should be per se unconstitutional, because once the government publicizes the names of the unindicted co-conspirators, the damage to their reputations, economic well-being, and expressive associations is done. . .
“In this case, the government had nothing to lose by violating the Department of Justice guidelines and the Constitution, as their stigmatizing of these ‘unpopular’ groups and persons could not be undone. . .”
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