Moussaoui Enters Supermax

Convicted 9/11 Conspirator Begins Life Sentence In Colo. Prison

(CBS/AP)  Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui on Saturday began serving his life sentence at a federal prison in Colorado after U.S. marshals flew him overnight from Virginia.

Marshals brought Moussaoui early Saturday to the Supermax federal prison in southern Colorado, where he will spend 23 hours a day in his cell and have little to no contact with other notorious criminals.

"He has now begun serving his sentence of life without the possibility of release," the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement.

A special team of deputy marshals took Moussaoui from a detention center in Alexandria, Va., late Friday night, put him on a small jet operated by the agency and delivered him to the prison in Florence, Colo., about 90 miles southwest of Denver.

The transfer came got under way on the same day that his court-appointed lawyers appealed his life sentence and the denial of his request for a new trial.

In a one-paragraph notice of appeal, Moussaoui's lawyers said Friday he wanted the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the final judgment and sentence he received May 4 and Judge Leonie Brinkema's May 8 denial of his request to withdraw his guilty plea and go to trial on the original charges.

The notice was required to be filed by May 18 if the 37-year-old Frenchman wanted to appeal his case. It contained no legal arguments about the case; those will be filed later with the appeals court.

Since his sentencing, Moussaoui has said he lied when testifying at his sentencing trial that he was to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11, 2001. He has returned to claiming — as he had for four years before the trial testimony — that he had nothing to do with the suicide hijackings that took nearly 3,000 lives on Sept. 11, 2001.

Moussaoui was in jail in Minnesota on immigration charges on 9/11, but he has admitted he was training to hijack a Boeing 747 jetliner and fly it into the White House as part of a later plot to gain release of a radical Egyptian sheik who is serving a life term for terrorist acts.

Legal experts give Moussaoui little chance for success at the appellate level.

The $60 million Supermax, formally called Administrative Maximum, was built in 1995 in a town of 3,600 people. The triangular, two-story prison was designed for inmates once held at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Ill., which had replaced Alcatraz when it closed in 1963.

Among the inmates at the prison are Ramzi Yousef, Eric Rudolph, Ted Kaczynski and Terry Nichols. Also there is Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber he said was to help him fly a fifth plane into the White House.

At Supermax, the soundproofed cells were designed so inmates cannot make eye contact with each other. Each 7-by-12-feet cell has a long, narrow window looking out at other prison walls or the small concrete recreation yard.

Concrete platforms topped with mattresses function as beds. Each cell also contains a concrete stool, shower and toilet.

Inmates get one hour out of their cells each day to eat or play basketball or handball, though some earn longer recreation periods through good behavior. They can take academic courses via closed-circuit television in each cell. Religious services are conducted in a small chapel