Moussaoui Judge: It's Clear Who Won

At Sentencing, Moussaoui Says U.S. Would Never Catch Al Qaeda Chief

(CBS/AP) 
Lisa Dolan, who lost her husband Bob in the attack on the Pentagon, was one of three family members of victims allowed to speak at the brief sentencing hearing.

She turned to Moussaoui said, "There is still one final judgment day."

Moussaoui sat in his chair staring at Dolan and the other family witnesses, Rosemary Dillard and Abraham Scott, betraying no emotion as they spoke.

Moussaoui walked into the courtroom flashing a victory sign.

"You have branded me as a terrorist or a criminal or whatever," Moussaoui said. "Look at yourselves. I fight for my belief." He spoke for less than five minutes.

French authorities said Thursday they may eventually press the U.S. to have Moussaoui serve his life sentence in France, though CBS News' Laura Haim reports that a spokesman for the French Embassy says this is unlikely to happen.

Moussaoui's mother Aicha El Wafi, pressed for her country to intervene, CBS News correspondent Elaine Cobbe reports. "Now he is going to die in little doses," she said. "He is going to live like a rat in a hole. What for? They are so cruel."

After seven days of deliberation, the nine men and three women rebuffed the government's appeal for death for the only person charged in this country in the suicide hijackings of four commercial jetliners that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

From the White House, President Bush said Wednesday the verdict "represents the end of this case but not an end to the fight against terror." He said Moussaoui got a fair trial and the jury spared his life, "which is something that he evidently wasn't willing to do for innocent American citizens."

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, attending a European Union security conference in Vienna, told reporters Thursday: "There are challenges that exist with respect to prosecuting terrorist cases in our system. I think justice was served in this case."

Under federal law, a defendant automatically receives life in prison when a jury is split, CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart reports. The 42-page verdict form gives no indication on how, or if, the jury split.

The jury rejected two key defense arguments, that Moussaoui suffers a mental illness and that executing him would make him a martyr. No jurors indicated on the verdict form that they gave any weight to those arguments.

Nine jurors found that Moussaoui suffered a difficult childhood in a dysfunctional family where he spent many of his early years in and out of orphanages. Three found that Moussaoui only played a minor role in the attacks.

In their successful defense of Moussaoui, defense lawyers overcame the impact of two dramatic appearances by Moussaoui himself, first to renounce his four years of denying any involvement in the attacks and then to gloat over the pain of those who lost loved ones.

He was still belittling that pain Thursday. Referring to Dillard, who lost her husband Eddie in the Pentagon attack, he said: "I destroyed a life and she lost a husband. Maybe one day she can think about how many people the CIA has destroyed."

"You have a hypocrisy beyond belief," he said. "Your humanity is a selective humanity."

Using evidence gathered in the largest investigation in U.S. history, prosecutors achieved a preliminary victory last month when the jury ruled Moussaoui's lies to federal agents a month before the attacks made him eligible for the death penalty because they kept agents from discovering some of the hijackers.

But even with heart-rending testimony from nearly four dozen victims and their relatives, the jury was not convinced that Moussaoui deserved to die.

Alice Hoagland told CBS News' The Early Show she believes the jury made the right decision. Her son, Mark Bingham, was killed when United Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.

"We all are members of the human race. And as vile and criminal as Mr. Moussaoui has shown himself to be, we in America are above the kind of hatred and violence that he has shown us. So I do welcome the sentence that they've handed down," Hoagland said.

But retired Colonel Brian Birdwell, who survived the attack on the Pentagon, told The Early Show, "Has justice been served? Yes. But not with the voracity that I think that Mr. Moussaoui deserves."