U.S. Tries To Salvage Moussaoui Case

Prosecutors Ask Judge To Allow Testimony; U.S. Lawyer Put On Leave

(CBS/AP) 

Martin, a former flight attendant who finished law school at 36, faces the possibility of disbarment, a stiff fine, even prison.

"She's really completely torn up," said her mother, Jean Martin Lay. "How could it happen?"

Martin, 51, earned about $120,000 a year in her job as a Transportation Security Administration attorney.

Prospective trial witnesses described Martin as a zealous lawyer — perhaps too zealous.

"She was taking up quite a bit of our time," said Claudio Manno, deputy assistant administrator for security at the Federal Aviation Administration. "Ms. Martin sometimes had a tendency to go off on tangents that really were not all that relevant."

The only person charged in this country in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April to conspiring with al Qaeda to fly airplanes into U.S. buildings. But he denies any involvement in 9/11, saying he was training for a possible future attack.

This trial is to decide whether he is executed or spends life behind bars.

Prosecutors said the excluded evidence "is one of the two essential and interconnected components of our case."

The prosecution's case is based on offensive and defensive measures they argue the government would have taken if Moussaoui had not lied to FBI agents about his terrorist connections when arrested in Minnesota three weeks before al Qaeda flew jetliners into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on 9/11.

They say offensive steps by the FBI to locate 9/11 hijackers in advance and defensive airport security measures by federal aviation officials would have combined to prevent at least one death that day. To get a death penalty, prosecutors must show beyond a reasonable doubt that an action of Moussaoui's — his lies, in this case — led directly to at least one 9/11 death.

As a compromise, prosecutors offered to drop arguments that the Federal Aviation Administration would have barred small knives, like those used by the hijackers, from planes and would have altered its terrorist screening profiles to catch the attackers.

Instead, they would call one witness, whom they did not identify, who worked at the FAA in August 2001 and could discuss the government's use of "no-fly" lists to bar named terrorists from planes and how those lists evolved. They said Martin had no contact with this witness.

"We don't know whether it is worth us proceeding at all, candidly, under the ruling you made today," Assistant U.S. Attorney Rob Spencer said in an unusually blunt assessment during a conference call Tuesday. Spencer added that continuing under these conditions would "waste the jury's time and the court's time, and we're all mindful of the expense of this proceeding."

If Brinkema refuses to budge, it's not clear what appeals remain open. Defense attorney Edward MacMahon said the government can't appeal Brinkema's ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond now that the trial is under way.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said prosecutors might ask the appeals court for a rarely used common law relief order called a writ of mandamus, but such orders are granted only in extraordinary circumstances.