7/7: Crime & Prejudice - Free Hamid online petition - AP news online -
This is the first time an Imprisonment for Public Protection Order has been used ... For going camping, letting the BBC take him paint-balling and making some poorly judged statements Hamid could stay in prison for the rest of his life. 7/7: Crime and Prejudice, 2011
Mohammed Hamid is one of the many victims of Britain’s ‘war on terror’ languishing in prison. He was arrested, along with fourteen other men, in the wake of the 2005 London bombings and charged with ‘providing terrorist training’. On 26th February 2008 Hamid was found guilty of ‘providing terrorist training’ and ‘soliciting murder’ and sentenced to an ‘indeterminate sentence for public protection’ with a tariff (minimum term) of seven years, after which he will only be released if the Parole Board declares he is sufficiently low risk to be freed. Free Hamid online petition
‘While we are grateful for the dismissal, the 14 years Hamid spent behind bars on charges of which he was innocent remain a grave miscarriage of justice,’ his family and lawyers said in their statement. ‘Hamid’s exoneration is a cause for celebration, but the story of his case is tragedy that must not be repeated.’
They noted that both the federal judge and a federal magistrate found that multiple witnesses credibly testified, years after his conviction, that Hamid could not have committed the crimes.
Both judges decided ‘that Hamid would not have been found guilty had the powerful evidence of his innocence that won his freedom in 2019 been presented to his jury in 2006’, the attorneys and family said in their statement.
Investigators initially alleged that five men were part of an al-Qaida ‘sleeper cell’ in Lodi.
But only Hayat, who was born in California, was convicted of terror-related crimes, while three other suspects were eventually deported without charges. Hayat’s father, an ice cream truck driver, admitted to a customs violation after a jury was unable to reach a decision on whether he lied to federal agents about his son’s activities.
US District Judge Garland E Burrell jr found that inexperienced defense attorney Wazhma Mojaddidi failed to find those alibi witnesses, who would have testified that Hayat never had time to receive terror training while visiting relatives and getting married in his ancestral village in Pakistan.
They said that the longest Hayat was absent from his family’s ancestral village of Behboodi while visiting Pakistan with family members between 2003 and 2005 was one week. That directly contracted his purported confession to attending a training camp for three to six months.
His defense attorney also should have provided a witness to testify that what prosecutors said was an incriminating note found in Hayat’s wallet was in fact a religious supplication commonly used by many Muslims, he ruled.
Bill Portanova, a defense attorney and former prosecutor not affiliated with the case, noted that prosecutors had evidence including other witness testimony and Hayat’s self-incriminating statements.
‘The case was legitimately brought,’ he said. ‘It’s not like there was a complete absence of proof.
‘This one was very high profile, so the dismissal years later attracts a lot of attention, but it doesn’t reflect poorly on the government,’ Portanova said.
He disagreed with Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento Valley office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who in a statement called the conviction an ‘egregious injustice’.
‘An entire community was left traumatized due to prosecution taking advantage of anti-Muslim, post-9/11 hysteria,’ Elkarra said. AP News online article 14th February 2020