Author: Pam Belluck
Publication: The New York Times
Date: January 31, 2003
Richard C. Reid, who said he was
a member of Al Qaeda and pleaded guilty to trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic
flight with explosives concealed in his shoes, was sentenced today to life
in prison.
Mr. Reid was unrepentant and confrontational,
telling Judge William G. Young of Federal District Court, "I am at war
with your country" and saying, "I further admit my allegiance to Sheik
Osama bin Laden, to Islam and to the religion of Allah."
Afterward, he resisted as officers
tried to handcuff him and tug him out of the courtroom. He shouted at the
judge: "You're not going to stand me down. You'll go down. You will be
judged by Allah. Your flag will come down and so will your country."
Judge Young denounced Mr. Reid and
dismissed his assertion that he was a righteous soldier, defending the
Islamic world from hostile American policies.
"You are not an enemy combatant,
you are a terrorist," Judge Young said. "You are not a soldier in any army,
you are a terrorist. To call you a soldier gives you far too much stature."
"You are a terrorist, and we do
not negotiate with terrorists," the judge continued. "We hunt them down
one by one and bring them to justice."
Judge Young called Mr. Reid "a species
of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders." And he told Mr. Reid,
a tall, lumbering man with scraggly black hair, "You're a big fellow, but
you're not that big."
Mr. Reid, a 29-year-old British
citizen, pleaded guilty in October to trying to ignite bombs hidden in
the soles of his black high-top sneakers on a Paris-to- Miami flight on
Dec. 22, 2001. A flight attendant smelled sulfur from the matches Mr. Reid
was lighting and noticed him in Seat 29A, trying to set the tongue of one
of his shoes on fire.
Then, passengers and crew members
overpowered Mr. Reid. Two doctors on board injected him with sedatives,
and the plane, American Airlines Flight 63, was diverted to Boston's airport,
escorted by two F-15 fighter jets. None of the 197 passengers and crew
members were seriously hurt, but two flight attendants suffered minor injuries.
Three of the flight attendants testified
at today's hearing, saying they continued to experience trauma.
"I, a 5-2 woman, wrestled a 6-4
man alone," said one, Cristina Jones. "I tried to lunge over Seat 29A,
and that's when he bit me through my skin."
While making his guilty plea last
fall, Mr. Reid laughed, saying: "'Basically, I got on the plane with a
bomb. Basically, I tried to ignite it. Basically, yeah, I intended to damage
the plane."
Today, he was sentenced on eight
charges, including attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted
murder. Judge Young also fined him $2 million.
Mr. Reid could have received a minimum
of 60 years in prison. None of the charges carried a potential death penalty.
Unlike Zacarias Moussaoui, who is being held in relation to the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks and could face the death penalty, Mr. Reid was not charged
with conspiracy.
Prosecutors had urged that Mr. Reid
receive a life sentence with no chance of parole.
In the course of their investigation,
federal prosecutors said Mr. Reid received training at Al Qaeda terrorist
camps in Afghanistan. And investigators said they uncovered documents showing
that in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Reid traveled in Israel
and other Middle Eastern countries, looking for vulnerable places to plant
bombs.
Although Mr. Reid told investigators
that he had constructed the bombs himself from materials he bought in Europe,
prosecutors said they found evidence that he had help. Among the evidence
was a human hair in the bomb and a palm print on the paper used to make
the detonator.
In May, Robert S. Mueller III, the
F.B.I. director, said he believed that "an Al Qaeda bomb maker" made the
shoe bomb.
Prosecutors also released e-mail
messages they said Mr. Reid wrote before boarding the American Airlines
flight. In one he described a dream of waiting for a ride in a truck only
to learn that the truck had no room for him. In the e- mail message, he
wrote that he believed that the truck symbolized the Sept. 11 attacks and
that the dream revealed his frustration at not being one of the hijackers.
Mr. Reid's public defenders sought
to portray him in a softer light.
In a sentencing memorandum, the
lawyers said Mr. Reid was the product of a broken home who grappled with
racial intolerance. The memorandum said that Mr. Reid's black Jamaican
father was rarely around and that Mr. Reid, whose mother was British, was
conscious of being the only dark-skinned person in his family.
The lawyers said these experiences
stoked Mr. Reid's anger and led him into a life of drug addiction, foster
homes and petty crime. Ultimately, defense lawyers wrote, he converted
to Islam in prison to find meaning in his life, and his effort to blow
up the plane was an act "to prevent the destruction of the religion that
saved him."
In court today, one of Mr. Reid's
lawyers, Owen Walker, asked the judge to view Mr. Reid's act as a reflection
of "geopolitical forces that we don't fully understand."
And Mr. Reid, tapping the table
and jiggling his leg in a beige prison uniform and navy blue tennis shoes,
told the judge, "I think I ought not apologize for my actions."
"Your government has killed two
million children in Iraq," he said, and "your government has sponsored
the rape and torture of Muslims in the prisons of Egypt and Turkey and
Syria and Jordan with their money and with their weapons. O.K.?"
"I don't see what I done as being
equal to rape and to torture or to the deaths of the two million children
in Iraq," Mr. Reid said.
Judge Young was clearly not swayed.
"We are not afraid of any of your
terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid," the judge said. "We are Americans.
We have been through the fire before."
Pointing to the flag on the courtroom
wall, he said: "You see that flag, Mr. Reid? That's the flag of the United
States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten.
That flag still stands for freedom. You know it always will."
