Miami bomb plot suspects "entrapped," lawyers say

Seven men charged with conspiring to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI building in Miami were entrapped by a federal informant, lawyers for two of the suspects said on Monday.

Oh please. 

An indictment issued last week accused the men of pledging loyalty to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and seeking the group’s support to "wage war" against the U.S. government.

The person they thought was an al Qaeda representative was actually an FBI informant, U.S. Justice Department officials said.

Albert Levin, the court-appointed attorney for suspect Patrick Abraham, said he believes his client was ensnared by the informant.

Sure…I bet it went like this:

• Suspect:  Are you with Al Qaeda?
• Agent:  Yep
• Suspect:  I wanna blow something UP, can you help me?
• Agent:  Sure, will you pledge your loyalty to Osama?
• Suspect:  You bet. (makes oath)
• Agent:  Congrats you are one of us now.  Praise Allah.
• Suspect:  Cool.  Can I have a bomb now?
• Agent:  Sure…I will bring one right over…I am dressed in a blue jacket that says FBI on it.
• Suspect:  Isn’t that the…
• Agent:  Yes, but it’s ok.  We use them to fool the cops.
• Suspect:  Man you guys are smart. 

Yea…twisted his arm out of the socket I betcha.

There was "a lot of talking going on by the informant and more listening by the defendant and or the defendants," Levin told Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly.

Nathan Clarke, a lawyer for another suspect Rotschild Augustine, agreed.

"With respect to my client, from what I can read in the indictment, there’s going to be a question of whether there’s even sufficient evidence to sustain the burden of proof on conviction," Clarke said.

"If by any chance there’s a scintilla of that then, of course, there’s going to be the entrapment issue," he said.

"This thing took place over eight months, according to the indictment and at the end of the indictment, it says that this thing became disorganized and nobody had ever done anything or did anything," Clarke said.

Abraham, Augustine and three other men arrested on Thursday in Miami appeared briefly in a magistrate’s court on Friday.

Another suspect arrested in Atlanta made his initial court appearance there on Friday. The seventh suspect, arrested in the Miami area earlier last week on a probation violation, was scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday.

Whatever.  If the indictment reports are true, these guys wanted to blow up the Sear’s tower in Chicago.  Yep.  Sounds like a bunch of frat guys doing a college prank to me.

Yes, I understand that the defense lawyers have to try to defend these guys from their own idiocy.  That is a cornerstone of Amercian Justice.

But if they are experienced lawyers, they had better be careful.  The entrapment defense is hardly foolproof:

In jurisprudence, entrapment is a procedural defense by which a defendant may argue that they should not be held criminally liable for actions which broke the law, because they were induced (or entrapped) by the police to commit said acts. For the defense to be successful, the defendant must demonstrate that the police induced an otherwise unwilling person to commit a crime. However, when a person is predisposed to commit a crime, offering opportunities to commit the crime is not entrapment, a widely held misconception similar to the idea that policemen must answer questions truthfully if they are asked the same question three times, or that they must say "yes" if asked if they are a police officer. (source: Wikipedia- emphasis mine)

If the agent has even one conversation recorded showing that they were eager to perform, they are toast.  And considering they got their contacts in a chat room, well I bet someone had a save button somewhere.

Enjoy prison.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS