BOISE, Idaho, 12 June 2004 — Handing the government a stinging defeat, a jury acquitted a Saudi graduate student on Thursday of charges that he had used his computer expertise to help terrorists raise money and recruit followers.
“I hope the message is that the First Amendment is important and meaningful in this country,” said David Nevin, a lawyer for the student, Sami Omar Al-Hussayen.
The case against Al-Hussayen, 34, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Idaho, was seen as an important test of a provision of a new antiterrorism law that makes it a crime to provide expert advice or assistance to terrorists. Al-Hussayen set up and ran websites that prosecutors said were used to recruit terrorists, raise money and disseminate inflammatory rhetoric. They said the sites included religious edicts justifying suicide bombings and an invitation to contribute money to the militant Palestinian organization Hamas.
Nevin said Al-Hussayen had little to do with creating the material posted, which he argued was protected by the First Amendment right to freedom of expression and was not intended to raise money or recruit extremists.
“There was a lack of hard evidence,” said one juror, John Steger. “There was no clear-cut evidence that said he was a terrorist, so it was all on inference.”
Al-Hussayen was acquitted on all three terrorism charges, as well as one count of making a false statement and two counts of visa fraud. Jurors could not reach verdicts on three false-statement counts and five visa-fraud counts, and a mistrial was declared on those charges.
United States Attorney Tom Moss said it would be a week before a decision was made on whether to retry Al-Hussayen on those eight counts. Al-Hussayen faced up to 15 years for each of the three terrorism charges, 25 years on each charge of visa fraud and five years on each charge of making false statements. He still faces deportation.
Justice Department officials in Washington declined to comment on the verdict, which the jury reached after seven days of deliberations and a trial that lasted seven weeks.
Al-Hussayen, a member of a prominent family from Riyadh, the Saudi capital, has been jailed since his February 2003 arrest, but continued to work toward his doctorate from his cell. His wife and their children returned to Saudi Arabia this year rather than fight deportation.
In January, a federal judge in California ruled in a separate case that the provision under which Al-Hussayen was prosecuted violated the First and Fifth Amendments.
