According to Law.com, this defendant decided to dismiss his court-appointed attorneys to represent himself. Regardless of guilt or innocence (and there is a presumption of innocence which many of us foolishly roll our eyes at), criminal courtrooms are not the place for pro se litigants.
One of his attorneys is Khurrum B. Wahid of Miami, Florida. I know Mr. Wahid by reputation and what I know is that he is a very good trial lawyer. Like his client, Mr. Wahid is an American-Muslim. Mr. Wahid is active in public interest work and has dedicated a lot of his time to civic engagement. In particular, Mr. Wahid is very active in promoting voter registration and voter turnout in elections among American-Muslims and other minority communities.
My point is that Sadequee had the benefit of great lawyers, one of whom is the defendant's co-religionist and whose bona fides as a dedicated advocate for American-Muslims are well documented. The other attorney is Donald F. Samuel of Atlanta, GA.
This is what Law.com is reporting:
On Thursday, Samuel said that although Sadequee had talked about defending himself at trial for about six months, he did not inform his lawyers until Monday, the day the trial began, that he had decided to represent himself. Samuel said that Sadequee has said that "Allah told him he should speak for himself." Samuel added, "There were certain things he wanted to raise, certain moral issues." There were also questions that Sadequee wanted certain witnesses to address that Samuel said "we disagreed with." Samuel did not elaborate.
Sadequee is doing himself a huge disservice and I think he is doing the system a disservice as well. We know that several of the terrorism trials (perhaps many more than several) across the country have ended with acquittals or convictions on lesser (and non-terrorism) charges. This is because the defendants had skilled lawyers who were able to do the system justice by forcing the prosecution to prove their cases beyond a reasonable doubt. Our system's effectiveness depends on a robust adversarial engagement in litigation.
With Sadequee representing himself he is likely to bolster the prosecution's case unwittingly. He may convey a message to the trier of fact (the judge or the jury) that is not factual and would not have been conveyed if the proper defense had been presented.
We know that innocent people get convicted of crimes in our system. It happens more often than we may admit but it is true. Sometimes this happens when the lawyer is ineffective and other times it happens despite a great defense team and a great defense strategy. In light of all of this, Sadequee's decision to forego the assistance of great lawyers to defend himself in a criminal trial on terrorism-related charges bodes ill for him and for the war on terror in general.
It is in the public's interest that only those who are truly guilty of terrorism be convicted of the same. Convicting people who are innocent but just did not have an adequate defense can have negative implications for fighting terrorism, because it can: (1) create a false sense of success, and/or (2) allow an over-zealous prosecution to continue bringing inflated and un-provable charges of terrorism in future cases. Neither of these consequences should be acceptable to us.
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