Why the Moussaoui verdict fits

Zacarias Moussaoui, the 9/11 plotter who was already in jail at the time of the World Trade Center attacks, was today sentenced by a federal jury to life in prison. The verdict they chose, when given the options of life in the clink or death by injection, is appropriate. While the government tried to manipulate the jury to obtain a death sentence, with pictures of men and women falling out of the flaming towers, the objective truth is that Moussaoui was a plotter, and nothing more. He wanted to kill those people, but he didn't. Today he claim he won, but he didn't. He'll rot in jail, as former Congressman Tim Roemer put it. He'll die slowly, under a sentence appropriate for HIS, not his compatriots, actions (or lack thereof).

William Buckley, Jr, the conservative stalwart, questioned the government's strategy a few weeks ago.
Buckley. Predicting a life sentence, he suggested that the government was setting itself up to look like it "lost" in the case the death penalty was not chosen. The avenging bloodlust of the prosecutors, Rudy G, and others who want Moussaoui to be a proxy for all the men on the plans is in fact detrimental to the government's image, the institution of the death penalty (leading to another high profile case where death penalty opponents could publicly question its use), and is also a misuse of the death penalty, which, for whatever reasons invoked, should punish only the most severe actions, not intentions.

Moussaoui lost, but so did the government by pushing hard for the death penalty. Luckily, the legal system got it right by recognizing that the emotions of 9/11 should not color the judgments of a man who was guilty of plotting, not doing.