[ April 19, 2024 ]
A judge today vacated the case against Hamid Hayat, the Lodi jihadist, on procedural grounds.
NY Times: Hamid Hayat’s case had put a spotlight on the farming town of Lodi, Calif., where the authorities said men were financing terrorist groups abroad and recruiting members.
Story continues below advertisementA federal judge on Tuesday overturned the 2006 conviction of a California man accused of training in a Pakistani terrorist camp and lying to the F.B.I. about it, undoing a case once heralded by federal prosecutors after the Sept. 11 attacks as a proactive victory against terrorism.
The man, Hamid Hayat, 35, was sentenced in 2007 to 24 years in prison. He had served more than 14 years before Tuesday’s decision.
In overturning Mr. Hayat’s conviction and sentence, Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr., of United States District Court in Sacramento, said that Mr. Hayat had not been adequately represented during his trial. His lawyer did not use testimony from several witnesses who could have provided a credible alibi for Mr. Hayat, the judge wrote in his order.
“At the time that all of this happened, back in 2005, this was an international story,” Mr. Riordan said. “The F.B.I. said there was a sleeper cell of Al Qaeda in Lodi, Calif., of all places.”
Mr. Hayat and his father were the only two people charged in connection with that investigation. Terrorism charges against Mr. Hayat’s father were dropped after he pleaded guilty to lying about the amount of money he took out of the country.
The case against Hamid Hayat was largely built around his confessions as well as testimony from an informant who was paid about $225,000 after telling the F.B.I. that Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, once visited the Lodi mosque.
Mr. Hayat was accused of training at the camp between October 2003 and November 2004. A jury convicted Mr. Hayat in April 2006.
After Mr. Hayat’s conviction, McGregor Scott, the United States attorney in Sacramento, said, “We have detected, we have disrupted and we have deterred, and whatever was taking shape in Lodi isn’t going to happen now.”
[,,,]
A federal magistrate judge held hearings last year on whether Mr. Hayat’s original lawyer “failed to adequately investigate and present certain defenses on his behalf and to effectively represent him on certain issues during trial.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations-Sacramento applauded Judge Burrell’s decision.
Wazhma Mojaddidi, former CAIR executive director who represented Hyat in the first trial, botched the defense.
Because of her inexperience, she failed to follow proper procedures.
First, Wazhma Mojaddidi did not exhaust all opportunities to obtain alibi witnesses for Hyat, namely his family members in Pakistan.
These family members were subsequently allowed to testify in court via video conference last year. The judge found their testimony to be credible because they corroborated each other on details of Hyats’ visit.
Second, Mojaddidi is accused of not providing expert witnesses to counter Islamic expert Khaleel Mohammed.
Dr. Mohammad translated the supplication as:
“Oh Allah we place you at their throats and we seek refuge in you from their evils.”
He then testified that the supplication was
“not peaceful” because he looked up the supplication in several commentaries, and “just about every commentary [the expert] checked puts it [the supplication] in a case where someone who is in jihad makes this supplication” – United States v. Hayat 710 F.3d 875 (9th Cir. 2013) Decided Mar 13, 2013
Witnesses who might have offered counter testimony include Ingrid Mattson.
These witnesses stated in an Atlantic Monthly article that the supplication was “common”.
The court also found that Mojaddidi should have objected to Dr. Mohammed’s testimony that the supplication indicated a jihadist state of mind.
Additionally, Mojadini did not challenge Hyat’s confession as being improperly conducted.
In other words, he walks on a technicality.
Irrespective of the mechanisms of justice, as a layman, there still remains a great deal of concern about the lack of separation between many Muslims and jihadists supplications, the presence of CAIR, the Muslim Legal Fund of America, judge shopping, video testimony from Pakistan, super lawyer Denis Riordan, and rampant, willful ignorance about the dangers to society of unregulated Islam.
Sacramento judge vacates conviction in 13-year-old Lodi terror case of Hamid Hayat
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article233310597.html
In a stunning move, the federal judge in Sacramento who oversaw the trial and conviction of accused Lodi terror suspect Hamid Hayat 13 years ago has ordered the conviction and sentence vacated.
The order issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. essentially means Hayat’s appellate attorneys can seek his immediate release from a federal prison in Phoenix, where he had been serving his 24-year sentence.
“I don’t know whether the government will choose to appeal this order,” Hayat lead defense counsel Dennis Riordan said. “They have a right to do so.
“But as someone who has practiced appellate law for 40 years, there is no possibility of overturning a district court order that is wholly based on issues of credibility.”
Riordan, a nationally known San Francisco lawyer who spent 14 years working to free Hayat, said the decision was “as significant as any that I’ve had in my career.”
He said he was able to reach Hayat in prison by phone and delivered a message years in the making.
“I said, ‘The day has arrived, we won,’ ” Riordan said. “And he said, ‘You’re joking with me.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not. The decision came down today.’”
A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott, whose office prosecuted Hayat in 2006 and has maintained that the former Lodi cherry picker had trained in an overseas terror camp, issued a statement late Monday saying no decision had been made on how to respond to the judge’s order.
“We are in the process of reviewing the district court decision and assessing what steps, if any, should be taken and considering all our options,” the statement read.
Hayat’s family in Lodi issued a statement Tuesday rejoicing at the judge’s decision.
“We have been waiting 14 long years for Hamid to be freed,” the statement read. “Hamid cannot get those 14 years of his life back, but we are relieved to see the case take such a big step forward. We miss him and hope to be reunited with him soon.”
Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also applauded the decision.
“After all these years, we never lost hope that Hamid’s wrongful conviction would be overturned,” Elkarra said. “At the time of Hamid’s case, the prosecution took advantage of anti-Muslim, post-9/11 bias to convict an innocent man. And this much-needed good news comes at a time when Islamophobia and bigotry as a whole is on the rise.”
Burrell’s decision comes seven months after U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Barnes issued a 116-page recommendation to Burrell that the conviction be vacated because of ineffective representation by his original defense attorney, a woman who at the time had never tried a criminal case in federal court.
Barnes’ recommendation followed weeks of testimony in a 2018 hearing in which Riordan hammered home his contention that the FBI had coerced Hayat into false confessions, that the training camp he supposedly visited was not even open at the time he was in Pakistan and that alibi witnesses who could prove his innocence were not produced at the original trial.
The Hayat case has been controversial from the start, when federal prosecutors announced they had broken up a terror cell in Lodi and arrested Hayat on terror charges and his father, Umer, an ice cream truck driver, on charges of lying to the FBI.
In the post-9/11 atmosphere, the announcement sent shock waves through the Muslim community in Lodi and elsewhere, especially with allegations that Hamid Hayat, then 22, had allegedly taken part in explosives and weapons training that included using photos of President George W. Bush as targets.
Umer Hayat’s jury could not reach a verdict in his case and he later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to time served.
But Hamid Hayat, who was born in San Joaquin County in 1982, was found guilty in 2006 of terror-related charges and packed off to prison.
That began years of appeals efforts on his behalf, and Riordan eventually won the right to hold an evidentiary hearing in which he sought to prove that Hayat’s lawyer, Wazhma Mojaddidi of Sacramento, was so inexperienced that he could not have received a fair trial.
Evidence presented in the hearing included the fact that Mojaddidi did not present evidence from witnesses in Pakistan who could have cleared Hayat.
Some of those witnesses subsequently were called by Riordan in late-night video sessions from Pakistan during last year’s hearing and Burrell, in a 36-page decision, adopted the magistrate judge’s finding that the alibi witnesses could provide crucial testimony.
Mojaddidi, who has contended her client was innocent, issued a statement late Monday praising the decision to vacate his conviction.
“I am extremely happy to hear that Hamid will be freed and reunited with his family,” she said. “As a young attorney, I worked very hard with the legal team to prove his innocence and never gave up believing in him.
“Justice has finally been served.”
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47 Comments
4 years ago
What size settlement do you think this boar hog is going to receive? That judge should be dragged to the public square, publicly horsewhipped, and hanged by the neck until dead.
4 years ago
Reply to
knightsstrength
Actually, the attorney-at-law was simply doing its job … It’s the judge that is the true criminal in this instance.
4 years ago
Reply to
knightsstrength
They are following their perfect man – Moham-mad. And if you dare expose truth about him they will keel you !
just like the jihadis in Indianapolis are doing http://bit.ly/2rVCN7E
4 years ago
Reply to
Achmed Mohandjob
Maybe nothing, the verdict was vacated. He wasn’t declared innocent. Not sure. Hope not.
4 years ago
Reply to
Achmed Mohandjob
If the judge actually believes the lawyer was that grossly incompetent, why are they still a lawyer? Or it was an excuse to allow unquestioned persons to coordinate a lie to provide an alibi.
This is why appeals do not allow new arguments, but only those involved in the first trial.
And it seems like the prosecutor phoned this one in, not even questioning the defenses new assertions as to translations.
4 years ago
Reply to
Achmed Mohandjob
Instead of any cash settlement they should give him some guns, grenades, explosives and throat cutting knifes for which he would use the money anyway. That also would make him feel good and it would be a lot cheaper too.
4 years ago
Reply to
Achmed Mohandjob
Life stay @ U.S. Guantanimo Bay resort for “Aiding+Abetting” terrorism would do OK for placating the squeamish among us……@ least til more Americans get outraged enough for full strength justice.
4 years ago
Reply to
mtman2
Guantanamo Bay is a moslem paradise. Halal food. Tennis courts, doctors on call 24/7, military personnel have to clean the moslem inmates’ rooms where if they must move a queeranne, they have to wear gloves. Moreover, prayer rugs are furnished, they get some moslem imam type whenever they want it …. our tax dollars give ’em all of the queerannes they desire … and the list goes on. Guantanamo Bay’s detention camp, to make it a full moslem paradise … it’s only missing the little girls and little boys for the moslems to diddle.
4 years ago
Reply to
Achmed Mohandjob
With the next democrat president they may get those little boys and girls!
4 years ago
Just imagine what’s going to happen as more muslums become judges and prosecutors? It’ll be Zombie Muhammad incidents allah over the Islamic Puppet States of N. America. And you know what? Not a single, f’ing, solitary muslum bleated a word of protest over a f’ing muslum judge dismissing all charges against a fellow muslum for lack of evidence after this f’ing muslum tackled and choked a brave atheist who dared to dress up as Zombie Muhammad in a Halloween parade (and thus in front of dozens of witnesses).
4 years ago
Reply to
MuhamMUDTheFakeProphet
Maybe only a dozen witnesses, however I know there were at least two witnesses who had to drag the muslum parasite off the brave atheist by force and how does the eyewitness testimony of two independent witnesses qualify as “insufficient evidence”?
4 years ago
If he wasn’t radical enough in Afghanistan, I’m sure the CA State prison system has completed his Jihadi training by now.
4 years ago
Surprised that a male muslim would have a female as an attorney. Something smells fishy with this one.
Does anybody else think that CAIR or whatever muslim agencies they have set up in our country may have put that young inexperienced female attorney in place to represent him purpose? So that this could be the result in the end eventually?
Sounds like it to me.
4 years ago
Reply to
MISS VEGAS
They wouldn’t have waited this long to appeal if that were the case IMHO.
4 years ago
OH MY Don’t tell me his family 6000 miles away corroborated his story. What a shocker.
4 years ago
Surprise surprise. After 14 years to practice their story the family all had the same story to tell about his visit to Pakistan. Well, obviously we all know moslimes never lie to kuffar.
4 years ago
Reply to
Trevor Fortune
And the prosecutor was not prepared with the sura about lying if it benefits Islam.
4 years ago
Was the judge paid off or just “liberal”?
4 years ago
he chose his counsel,he should live in prison with it and he should be deported forthwith.
4 years ago
“We have been waiting 14 long years for Hamid to be freed,” the statement read. “Hamid cannot get those 14 years of his life back, but we are relieved to see thecase take such a big step forward. We miss him and hope to be reunited with him soon.” Gee, isnt that nice. He’ll be back home with his family in no time. I’m sure, hes eager to get right back in the fields picking cherries again. Why, he may even be ready to rekindle old friendships back in Pakistan and go back for a visit or two. And I’m quite sure Hamid will take what hes learned in prison and use those skills to become a productive member of society. My……..what a day indeed! We should all be SO proud our justice system really does mete out justice fairly.
sarc
4 years ago
If something in CA gets blown up, don’t ask the rest of the country to donate, New York either.
4 years ago
enemy inside..
4 years ago
“A judge today vacated the case against Hamid Hayat, the Lodi jihadist, on procedural grounds. NY Times: Hamid Hayat’s case had put a spotlight on the farming town of Lodi, Calif., where the authorities said men were financing terrorist groups abroad and recruiting members.”
Here we are seeing a real life example of something Winston Churchill said on efforts to prevent WW II:
“The Malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”
Two things need to be done immediately:
1.) Kick this judge off of the bench and execute him for treason.
2.) Find Hamid Hayat and execute him as an enemy combatant that he has clearly proven himself to be.
Anything less and we are encouraging these sub-human savages to destroy our country and civilization itself.
4 years ago
OT: Yet another horror in Germany!
In Stuttgart / Southern Germany, a muslim migrant has hacked to bits a 36 years old man wih a machete.So far the police is not certain whether or not they have arrested the right person. This happened just three days after an eritrean muslim had pushed a woman and her child under a train in heavily “enriched” Frankfurt. The child died.
Meanwhile the culprit of all these deaths, rapes, chaos, theft, destruction and havoc, Merkel, is having a good time off in Southern Tyrol / Italy! !
4 years ago
CALEX-PORN-IA – the lead U.S. – British style surrender State for foreign infiltration….no longer just for “fruits + nuts” but surrendering to all invaders.
4 years ago
Try him again and give him a life sentence this time.
4 years ago
I would not trust testimony dug up in a foreign country where lying to Americans is almost a sport.
4 years ago
Come on San Andreas, swallow up this EVIL land………….
4 years ago
Reply to
OneVeryAngryBlonde
You’re lucky you don’t have to live in this leaden hellhole, where the only thing that exceeds the number of property crimes is the constant traffic gridlock.
4 years ago
Reply to
OneVeryAngryBlonde
Lucky you! And RPV isn’t that bad either. I used to live in the LBC (as Snoop Dog used to describe it). I’m surprised to this day I was never mugged or held up at gunpoint, although I did have a face-off w/some hispanic gangbangers once.
4 years ago
4 years ago
4 years ago
Some recent news
Some good with the bad, pitty Netetlands not a complete ban, should include on the streets with the head coverings
Dutch burqa ban comes into effect
https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/08/dutch-burqa-ban-comes-into-effect/
Syrian migrant hacks man to death in broad daylight in Germany
https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/08/syrian-migrant-hacks-kazakh-man-to-death-in-broad-daylight-in-stuttgart-germany/
Hate how these governments say they have mental problems when it is Islam itself and do nothing to eradicate them.
African train murderer has “psychiatric problems” according to German authorities
https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/08/african-train-murderer-has-psychiatric-problems-according-to-german-authorities/
4 years ago
Why do we need capital punishment?
To make sure a N a z i doesn’t let a dangerous wacko go free …
4 years ago
What an amazing defense to ultimately beat the charge… hire an incompetent defense attorney then have the charges dropped because your attorney, the attorney you chose, was incompetent. And that’s justice? Sounds like sharia!
4 years ago
Only 14 years?
4 years ago
Only 14 years?
