Jury Deadlocked for a Second Time in Miami Terror Trial
Judge urges deadlocked jury to continue deliberating in trial of six Miami men.
April 15, 2008— -- The 12-member jury in the trial of six Miami men accused of planning an attack on Chicago's Sears Tower is deadlocked a second time, ABC News has confirmed.
Before lunch, the jury sent a note to the presiding judge, saying they could not reach verdicts on any charges on any of the six defedants. Invoking the Allen charge, U.S. District Court Judge Joan Lenard urged the jury to continue deliberating on the case, which already resulted in one deadlocked jury last December and the acquittal of a seventh defendant.
Last week ABCNews.com spoke with legal experts who said the outcome of this trial will put the credibility of U.S. efforts to crack down on "homegrown terrorists" at stake.
The case is "more hype than evidence," Neal Sonnett, past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told ABCNews.com, and it's a viable argument that the government's informant "created the crime."
"Let's make sure there is some reasonable basis for believing that we are on the path of some real terrorists," University of Miami law professor Bruce Winick, who has been following the case, said.
The arrests of the men, from Miami's impoverished Liberty City neighborhood, in June 2006 gained national attention, with the Bush administration claiming the arrests were an important victory in the war on terror.
But serious questions of entrapment plagued the men's first trial.
"There was a problem with lack of evidence," said Jeffrey Agron, the jury foremen in the first trial. "There was talk of them wanting to do certain things, but when they raided their headquarters, they never found any literature dealing with jihad or with terrorism or bomb-making or destroying buildings," Agron said.
"They never found any material used for bomb-making or schematics of the Sears Tower or any other building," Agron also told ABCNews.com. "A number of jurors just didn't believe that these guys were really terrorists, that they were sort of brought into this scheme with the promise of money, and that they were really looking to get money, and they were pretending to be terrorists in order to get money from al Qaeda or somebody they thought maybe was connected to al Qaeda." Agron added some jurors also questioned the credibility of the FBI's informant witnesses.
Those same issues were raised in the retrial. As in the first trial, the six defendants are all charged with plotting with al Qaeda to overthrow the U.S. government by taking an "oath of allegiance" to the terror group and conspiring to carry out attacks on the Sears Tower and FBI buildings.
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