All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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What jurors did in the just-completed terror conspiracy and support trial of Jose Padilla and two other defendants is a travesty upon justice and an unconscionable affront to the judge, the witnesses, the lawyers and especially the defendants themselves, who, whatever we think of them, surely deserved a more reasoned approached to deliberations than what they received.

After a complex trial that lasted three full months, after scores of witnesses took the stand and reams of documents were introduced as evidence, the seven men and five women of the jury, sitting in judgment of men who face life sentences, took approximately 11 hours to unanimously conclude that all three defendants were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of three charges each. This means that jurors spent less than one hour of deliberations for each week of trial testimony. (The rule of thumb, any trial attorney will tell you, is that one week of trial testimony usually tracks one day of deliberations.) Veteran reporters who had covered the trial from the start were shocked by the speed of the verdict. I was shocked. Prosecutors were shocked. Defense attorneys were shocked.

This HOV-lane justice might have been understandable (if not excusable) in a murder case involving a confession, or a simple larceny case, or even a civil trial brought by a sympathetic plaintiff against a big, evil corporation. But the Padilla trial was none of these things...

Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com. He's in Miami this week, covering the Jose Padilla terror trial.

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MIAMI- If you listened to prosecutor Brian Frazier begin to deliver the government’s closing argument Monday morning in the Jose Padilla terror support and conspiracy trial, and you knew nothing about the facts or the law, you would have thought you had dropped in on a case tracking a crime that had left scores dead and wounded.

In just the first 15 minutes of his presentation alone, Frazier used the words “murder” and “Al Qaeda” over and over again. “Jose Padilla was a “mujahadeen recruit and an Al Qaeda trainee,” Frazier started off, describing the junior partner in the alleged conspiracy as a young man “attended an Al Qaeda training camp to learn how to kill.” The three defendants talked in code using sports analogies, the prosecutor said, and they used the word “football” when they really meant terror training. “But it was not a game, it was murder.”

Actually, as Frazier eventually had to concede, it wasn’t really murder. No one died as a result of the alleged conspiracy between the famous Padilla—once upon a time the so-called “dirty bomb” suspect and a national “face of terror”—and his two lesser- known co-defendants. No one was injured. There were no attempts to murder or injure. In fact, as I suspect we will soon hear from the defense attorneys, it isn’t completely clear that the otherwise small men did anything more than to fantasize about doing big things...

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In the trial of terror suspect Jose Padilla yesterday, prosecutors for the U.S. government presented into evidence an alleged al Qaeda training camp application containing the finger prints of the Chicago native once accused of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb.

My first reaction as I read this news: So you have to fill out an application to join al Qaeda? It's one of those terms that seems strange on its surface, like "Paul Wolfowitz's girlfriend" (not that I'm surprised Wolfowitz has a love interest, but the term "girlfriend" more befits adolescents making out in a food court than two high-level civil servants).

So what's on this al Qaeda application? One of the top-notch producers at the CBS News Investigative Unit, Phil Hirschkorn, wrote a good blog entry on yesterday's proceedings and he's included a copy of the form with the government's translation.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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There always has been a sense of bad karma in the terror conspiracy trial of Jose Padilla, the man introduced to us all nearly five years ago as the “dirty bomb” suspect. Perhaps this is because Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was sent off first into legal limbo as an “enemy combatant” before being dumped into federal court in Miami. Perhaps it is because the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke already has expressed reservations about the government’s case against Padilla and his two co-defendants. Perhaps it is because of the vast gulf between what the feds initially said about Padilla and what they now claim they can prove against him in court.

Whatever the case, the bad aura that surrounds the case hasn’t gotten any better as opening statements grow near...

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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Jose Padilla, the terror suspect introduced to us five years ago as an American planning to kill a city’s masses with a radiological bomb, has been incarcerated for so long without trial that he has had enough time to change the pronunciation of his last name—twice. A few years ago, when he was still being held incommunicado and without charges, Padilla changed it from Pa-DEE-ah to Pa-DILL-ah. And then last year, as a regular civilian defendant in our federal justice system, he changed it back, to Pa-DEE-ah.

No matter. Most of his potential jurors who are coming to federal court in Miami Monday are likely to know Padilla, however he happens to pronounce his name these days, as the “dirty-bomb guy,” a shorthanded identification he has assumed ever since then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a startling mid-day press conference via satellite from Russia, dramatically announced that Padilla’s arrest and the concomitant interruption of a “dirty bomb” plot. The government has long since dropped its initial bombshell of an accusation—never mind, our bad!—and Padilla is on trial now merely for providing “material support” to a terrorist organization and for being part of a criminal conspiracy to murder people abroad.

I use the word “merely” above not because the crimes with which Padilla now is charged are not serious. They are. Padilla and his two co-defendants (how would you like to be the two guys who have to go on trial with Padilla?) face life in prison without the possibility of parole if they are convicted on all counts. And, in fact, our federal prisons slowly are becoming warehouses for terror suspects just like Padilla and Company who ultimately either are convicted of, or plead guilty to visiting a terror training camp in the Mideast, training with and pleading support to terrorists, learning about jihad, and then coming back to the United States to try to convert the convertible to their heinous mission...

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