Posted on 04/25/2006 4:10:17 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
A mistrial was declared Tuesday in the federal terrorism trial of a Lodi man charged with lying to protect his son, who authorities say attended an al-Qaida training camp in Pakistan.
The announcement came one day after the jury told U.S. District Court Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. that it could not reach a unanimous decision.
"Their jury declared that it was hopelessly deadlocked this morning," deputy court clerk Carol Davis said.
Burrell questioned each member of the jury and then discharged them, she said.
Umer Hayat, a 48-year-old ice cream vendor, is charged with lying to FBI agents about whether his son attended the terror training camp while on a visit to Pakistan in 2003. His son, 23-year-old Hamid Hayat, stood trial before a separate jury. That jury continued to deliberate on Tuesday.
Umer Hayat faced up to 16 years in prison if he had been convicted of the two counts against him, both related to making false statements to federal agents.
His son faces one count of providing material support to terrorists by allegedly attending the camp while visiting Pakistan in 2003 and three counts of lying about it. He faces up to 39 years in prison if convicted of all charges against him.
Both men are U.S. citizens and were standing trial before separate juries.
The case against the father and son initially generated widespread interest because it raised concerns about a potential terrorist cell centered in the agricultural town about 35 miles south of the state capital. No such evidence arose during their trial.
Prosecutors say Hamid Hayat returned to the U.S. in May 2005 to await orders for carrying out attacks at grocery stores, hospitals and banks.
Their defense attorneys say the government failed to produce any evidence that Hamid Hayat ever attended the camp during the nine-week trial that began in mid-February.
"They couldn't prove it because it didn't happen," Umer Hayat's attorney, Johnny Griffin III, said outside court Tuesday. "He's not a terrorist. There is no evidence to demonstrate he is a terrorist."
He said a hearing is scheduled Friday on a motion to release Umer Hayat, followed by another hearing a week later to determine if the government will retry his case.
"The government put its best foot forward, and in my view slipped and fell in their efforts to obtain a conviction," Griffin said.
U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott issued a statement saying his office will evaluate the case before the May 5 status conference to determine what step it will take. He said the office would have no further comment until a resolution of Hamid Hayat's case.
Jurors were led out of the courthouse by armed security officers and escorted to their cars. Burrell discouraged them from talking to reporters because the jury considering Hamid Hayat's fate is still deliberating.
Umer Hayat's family gathered outside the courthouse and spoke to reporters after the jurors had left.
His wife, Salma Hayat, his son Arslan Hayat, 17, daughter Raheela, 11, and his nephew Usama Ismail, 20, also met briefly with the attorneys for both men.
"He wasn't guilty, like I told you guys," Arslan Hayat said. "He's going to be home. We want him back."
Ismail said he was "a little disappointed" that jurors hadn't found Umer innocent.
"It would have been different if he was (found) innocent," he said.
The case has unfolded as federal prosecutors were trying to recover from a series of missteps involving terrorism cases nationwide.
The Hayats' trial also was overshadowed by the death penalty phase of the case against Zacarias Moussaoui, which was going on at the same time in a federal courtroom in Virginia. Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The Hayat case centered on videotaped confessions the men gave separately last June to FBI agents and a government informant who secretly recorded hundreds of hours of conversations but whose credibility was challenged by the defense.
Defense lawyers' biggest hurdle was trying to persuade jurors to discount the men's videotaped confessions. They argued that the confessions were made under duress, after the men had been questioned for hours in the middle of the night.
The father and son eventually told the agents merely what they thought they wanted to hear, without realizing the legal consequences, their lawyers argued.
The trial is the result of what the government initially thought might be a much larger case. Its investigation into Lodi's 2,500-member Pakistani community began after agents received a tip in 2001 that Lodi-area businesses were sending money to terrorist groups abroad.
That investigation ultimately produced no results, but it eventually led to the Hayats.
Prosecutors described Hamid Hayat as having long-standing anti-American views and sympathy for terrorist groups.
His family said he was merely a directionless young man who traveled to Pakistan between 2003 and 2005 to find direction in life and a wife. At the time of his arrest last June, Hamid Hayat was working at a cherry-packing shed in Lodi, a wine-producing region and agricultural hub in California's Central Valley.
His attorney, Wazhma Mojaddidi, said the deadlock in the Umer Hayat case speaks to the lack of evidence in the trial involving his son.
"There just wasn't enough evidence in the case to find him (Umer) guilty," she said.
Mojaddidi said she doesn't believe Hamid Hayat's jury is aware of the mistrial in the other case. She said it had been admonished to avoid news about the trial.
Fox News just announced his son was convicted of
All counts in a separate trial..
Or the idiocy of the jury. Taped confessions are usually pretty convincing evidence... even if the defendants were kept up past their bedtime.
Good.
At least the son was convicted. Looks like a good pre-emption of somebody up to bad things.
If all they had on this father was making false statements during the investigation of his son... I'm not so worked up about that. Expecting parents and children to be willing to send each other up the river is perhaps not very realistic. That's essentially why spouses can't be forced to testify against each other.
I've never been very keen about this business of "making false statements" to police being a crime all on its own. Either nab somebody for a crime or not, but merely getting them for lying about whether they did it seems a bit petty to me. I understand about obstruction of justice, but it seems to me that there's some threshold for obstruction thats a little higher.
DON THOMPSON, Associated Press Writer
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A federal jury on Tuesday convicted a 23-year-old man of supporting terrorists by attending an al-Qaida training camp in Pakistan three years ago.
Hamid Hayat, a seasonal farm worker in Lodi, an agricultural town south of Sacramento, was convicted of one count of providing material support to terrorists and three counts of lying to the FBI.
The verdict came hours after a separate jury hearing a case against the man's father deadlocked, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial.
The father, 48-year-old ice cream truck driver Umer Hayat, is charged with two counts of lying to the FBI about his son's involvement in the training camp. Defense attorneys and prosecutors will meet in court May 5 to decide whether he will be retried.
Both men are U.S. citizens and stood trial in federal court before separate juries. They have been in custody since their arrests last June.
Both cases initially generated widespread interest because they raised concerns about a potential terrorist cell centered in the wine-producing region about 35 miles south of the state capital. But the government presented no evidence of a terror network during the nine-week trial.
Instead, the case centered on videotaped confessions the men gave to FBI agents and a government informant who secretly recorded hundreds of hours of conversations but whose credibility was challenged by the defense.
Prosecutors described Hamid Hayat as having "a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind" who returned from a two-year visit to Pakistan intent on carrying out attacks. Possible targets included hospitals, banks and grocery stores.
They presented no evidence to show that such attacks were imminent or even planned. But in closing arguments, a prosecutors said the case was intended to prevent terrorist attacks "long before anybody is hurt."
Defense lawyers for both men argued that the government didn't have a case against their clients because it had produced no evidence that the son ever attended a terrorist training camp.
Their biggest hurdle was trying to persuade jurors to discount the men's videotaped confessions. The statements were given separately last June during lengthy interrogations by the FBI in Sacramento.
Defense lawyers said the confessions were made under duress, after the men had been questioned for hours in the middle of the night.
The father and son eventually told the agents merely what they thought they wanted to hear, without realizing the legal consequences, their lawyers argued.
The trial is the result of what the government initially thought might be a much larger case. Its investigation into Lodi's 2,500-member Pakistani community began after agents received a tip in 2001 that Lodi-area businesses were sending money to terrorist groups abroad.
That investigation ultimately fizzled, but it did lead agents to Naseem Khan. The 32-year-old former Lodi resident was working a variety of fast-food and convenience store jobs in rural Oregon when agents approached him in October 2001, just a month after the terrorist attacks.
Khan, a Pakistani native who moved to the U.S. as a teenager, was recruited to infiltrate Lodi's Pakistani community.
He initially investigated the money laundering allegations and then targeted a pair of local imams before finally befriending Hamid Hayat. The Hayats grew to eventually consider Khan almost a member of the family.
After Hamid Hayat left for Pakistan in spring 2003, Khan kept in touch and recorded their telephone calls — some of which show Khan urging Hayat to attend a jihadi camp.
In one conversation, Khan exhorted Hayat to "be a man — do something!"
Hamid Hayat's lawyers seized on such conversations to show that the FBI informant pushed Hayat to attend a training camp, but ultimately produced no evidence that he had.
They also questioned the informant's credibility, in part because of his own testimony. Khan said that just before he was recruited, he told FBI agents he had seen Osama bin Laden's physician and two other international terrorists living in Lodi during the late 1990s. At the time, they were wanted for attacks in the Middle East and Africa.
Defense attorneys and terrorism experts said it was highly unlikely they would have been in the U.S. at that time, a point prosecutors conceded later in the trial.
THANK YOU for the info on the son!
I was totally depressed reading about the father!
Anybody who fails a lie detector test should be deported or jailed.
Of course the Democrats would scream and Bush would go up 20 points in the polls, so it will never happen.
Our local media never said a word about the son being convicted only that the father had a mistrial.
The Marxist Media has agenda's that must be maintained.
Ummm doesn't it say the son was found guilty??
IMO, the sins of omission are as evil as the MSM sins of commission.
Wonderful news!!!
On the upside one less Pakistani terrorist disturbing the worlds peace.
The sins of the father!
Now, let's begin the retrial w/o bail for the son of a pig!
I bet we're watching his son Arslan Hayat, 17,and his nephew Usama Ismail, 20, very closely.
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