12 Angry Men and Women

All week I've been uneasy about the conviction of Hamid Hayat, the Lodi, California ice-cream vendor charged with visiting a terrorist camp in Pakistan. Then I read Friday's Chronicle, and I got really upset:

One of 12 jurors who convicted a 23-year-old Lodi man Tuesday on charges that he trained for holy war disavowed the verdict late Thursday, alleging that she was bullied into a guilty finding amid a pattern of misconduct by fellow panelists.

"I never once throughout the deliberation process and the reading of the verdict believed Hamid Hayat to be guilty," Arcelia Lopez, a 44-year-old school nurse from Sacramento, said in a 2,000-word affidavit filed to the U.S. District Court in Sacramento by the defense just after 9 p.m.

Here's some of the misconduct she alleges:

Lopez said the foreman, Joseph Cote, 64, of Folsom, made offensive comments about Hayat during deliberations. She quoted him as saying, "If you put them in the same costume, then they all look alike."

The foreman sent a note last Friday to Burrell complaining that one juror "does not seem to fully comprehend the deliberation process." Lopez said this was a reference to her belief that Hayat was innocent....

Lopez said another juror, Rebecca Harris, 58, of Clements (San Joaquin County), brought in a long, typewritten note Monday and read it to the panel. Harris complained that her health was failing and, Lopez said, blamed it on her.

"The message of the statement was clearly to put pressure on me to change my vote," Lopez said in the affidavit. "She said that she herself couldn't take it anymore and that if I didn't change my vote, she would consider getting off the jury herself due to the stress."

It's just one more ugly detail in a case that probably never should have been brought. This was an investigation in search of a target, and when the broader conspiracy never materialized Hayat and his father took the fall:

The case initially generated widespread interest because it raised concerns about a potential terrorist cell centered in the wine-producing region about 35 miles south of the state capital.

But the government presented no evidence of a terrorism network during the nine-week trial. The case instead centered on videotaped confessions the men gave to FBI agents and a government informant who secretly recorded hundreds of hours of conversations but whose credibility was challenged by the defense....

The investigation became public last year when authorities arrested the Hayats and detained two local imams. The clerics and one of their sons were later deported for immigration violations, and the Hayats were the only people criminally charged in the probe....

The Hayats were secondary targets, developed after the FBI recruited an informant to infiltrate Lodi's 2,500-member Pakistani community.

In the end, the grand Lodi Sleeper Cell Conspiracy amounted to Hayat allegedly visiting a terrorist camp in Pakistan, and he and his father lying to the FBI about it. Even that paltry charge was short on evidence:

Prosecutors offered no evidence, aside from the men's videotaped FBI interrogations, that Hayat attended a Pakistani terrorist camp in late 2003 or planned to kill Americans, which was the basis for the central charge against him of providing "material support" to terrorists.

And then there's the paid informant, Naseem Khan, who tried to draw Hayat into discussions about jihad and such. His credibility was damaged a little when he claimed to have seen three of the top Al Qaeda officials in Lodi a few years back (a claim pretty much everyone, including the FBI, considers preposterous. It became clear to anyone paying attention that Khan would say whatever he needed to keep his meal ticket.

Finally, there's the matter of the 'confession'. Here's a bit that suggests how it went:

Among the hazier aspects of the case was the suggestion that the younger Hayat was in league with the clerics, who were in Lodi on religious-worker visas. Shabbir Ahmed and Mohammad Adil Khan were detained along with the Hayats but never charged in connection with terrorism. They agreed to be deported rather than fight immigration charges.

During the confession, when agent Timothy Harrison asked Hayat how he would get attack orders, Hayat responded, "Maybe, uh, send a letter or anything like that maybe."

"No, I don't think they're gonna send a letter," Harrison said, adding, "I think you're gonna have to talk to somebody here in Lodi."

"Yeah, maybe," Hayat said. Soon, Harrison brought up Ahmed and Hayat said, "You know, maybe him? I'm not sure, maybe Shabbir will tell me if he gets information like that." After further prodding, Hayat said, "He didn't tell me, but uh, I'm 100 percent sure that he will contact me."

If you harangue and bully and browbeat and pressure people long enough, and if along the way you suggest to them what it is they should confess to, they'll end up telling you what they think you want to hear. It sure looks like that's what happened in Hayat's case.

All of which explains why Lopez' retraction just makes me feel sick about the whole thing.

She says she was bullied; other jurors deny it, of course. I don't know whether the allegations are true, because I have no idea how credible any of these people are. I don't see Lopez as some heroic Henry Fonda here--she caved, by her own account, and she lied to the judge about agreeing with the verdict. In any case, it seems clear that she felt pressure to change her vote. Eleven other people all voting the other way, all wanting the ordeal to be over, all resenting you because you're the only one keeping it going--of course there was pressure. And in the end, she gave in.

Just as, it seems, Hayat did.

To vote for a conviction, the jurors had to believe Hayat's confession was genuine and not coerced or suggested; to get an unanimous verdict, the last juror had to do what none of the other jurors believed Hayat had done. That's the ultimate irony in this little story: the same dynamic was at work in the jury room as in the interrogation room.

[That's all, folks]