ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal jury decided Wednesday to spare the life of Zacarias Moussaoui, ensuring that the first person to be held accountable for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks will spend the rest of his life in prison.
The jury reached its decision after seven days of deliberations, and its verdict paperwork showed that the nine men and three women were widely split over how to punish the man who claimed he was to fly a fifth plane into the White House but whose trial suggested he actually knew little about the Sept. 11 plot.
The verdict ended a six-week trial punctuated by frequent outbursts from Moussaoui, tape recordings from the doomed United Flight 93, interrogation reports from the jailed Sept. 11 mastermind and the near-collapse of the prosecution after a government lawyer defied the judge's orders.
The 37-year-old French Moroccan convicted terrorist sat ramrod-straight along a side wall in the courtroom and appeared to be silently praying as the jurors, looking exhausted, filed into the courtroom late in the afternoon.
When U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema read the verdict and announced that the decision was life without parole, Moussaoui -- who refused to stand -- betrayed no surprise.
But when the courtroom was being cleared, he gleefully boasted that he had beaten the American judicial system, especially David J. Novak, the assistant federal prosecutor brought in as the government's death penalty expert.
Moussaoui clapped his hands and shouted: "America, you lost! David Novak, you lost! I won!"
Outside the courthouse, security was exceptionally tight. Scores of federal marshals and local sheriff's deputies, some with machine guns, ringed the area. Others were perched on rooftops, while government helicopters hovered above.
Moussaoui is to be formally sentenced this morning. He is expected to spend the rest of his life at the government's Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., where some of the country's most notorious criminals are held in permanent solitary confinement. Among those reported as being there are Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph.
When the sentencing trial began two months ago, many observers thought the government was sure to secure the death penalty because Moussaoui had pleaded guilty to being a Sept. 11 conspirator. And when Moussaoui twice testified, he all but dared the jury to put him to death.
