Terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui celebrated as he left the courtroom Wednesday afternoon, clapping and stating, "America, you lost ... I won."
He's right.
The life sentence received by Zacarias Moussaoui is simply incomprehensible. The jury explicitly rejected the idea that executing Moussaoui would make him a martyr, but still gave him life based on his rotten childhood. Seriously. Nine jurors found that Moussaoui had a terrible family life, and three found that he suffered racism. While the jurors unanimously found that Moussaoui "knowingly created a grave risk of death" and was involved in preparation for the attacks of September 11, they also found that he was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks, despite the fact that Moussaoui had plans for the attack on his computer. There is no doubt that had Moussaoui told investigators all he knew in August 2001 after his arrest, 3,000 murdered Americans would now be alive.
Most ridiculously, the jurors found that Moussaoui did not act in a "heinous, cruel, or depraved manner in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse." Perhaps the jurors weren't watching television the morning of September 11, when people on the top floors of the WTC were forced to choose between burning to death or leaping to certain death. Perhaps they were ignoring the videos when they were shown in court; perhaps they ignored the testimony of emergency workers who testified to the terrified phone calls made from the top floors of the WTC. It is hard to imagine more heinous cruelty or depraved torture. And Moussaoui not only took part in the planning, he celebrated the acts.
The jurors could have sent no stronger signal to the Islamists we fight that we lack the resolve to win than giving Moussaoui a life sentence of Oprah and hallal food. We must begin thinking: what would we do with Osama Bin Laden? Should we consider his rough and tumble time in Afghanistan during the 1980s? Should we consider placing him in a federal prison to live out his life on taxpayer-funded dialysis? The death penalty may rarely be applied in questionable circumstances - the case of Zacarias Moussaoui isn't a questionable circumstance. The death penalty was made for monsters like Moussaoui.
