For those of you who don't know Zacarias Moussaoui is the man who was being tried in connection to the 9/11 plot. He was in jail at the time of the attacks but was convicted of being complicit to the attacks. The sentencing phase took over a week while the jurors decided whether he should receive life in prison without parole or the death penalty. Their answer came yesterday when he was handed the nicer option of life in prison. Now generally you would expect that my initial reaction, as a proponent of the death penalty, would be outrage. This is in fact not the case, and actually if you bear with me I'm going to explain why I'm not at all disappointed by this verdict at all.

I should start out by explaining that the reason that three of the jurors gave was that he only had "limited knowledge" of the September 11th attacks. The other nine said that it was the terrible violence he endured while a child which led them to vote against the death penalty. Now both of these reasons are poor, especially the second one, but I expect such foolishness out of American juries these days. No one has the backbone to do the right thing. Like I said though, I'm not disappointed and here's why.

Reports of the trial have stated that the evidence wasn't extensive and that it wasn't until Moussaoui took the stand that he sealed his own fate. He was asking for the death penalty and he did his best to get himself convicted. Well if he wants it, why not give it to him eh? I suppose that would work, he certainly deserves death; he and those he worked with sure dealt out enough of it. Think of it this way though, why is it that he wanted death? First and foremost it is likely that he wanted to get those 72 virgins and whatnot. Simple enough I guess die in the service of allah on jihad and you get to Heaven right? Well I'm quite confident that he won't be making it to Heaven, and death will certainly be the greatest punishment he will ever receive, but it won't bother me that he has to sit and wait in prison while he thinks that his reward is coming. It will be a long wait that's for sure, unless some prison mates help him out in that area.

Greater than all of that though, I think if we gave him the death penalty we would have given the terrorists a martyr. They are certainly causing enough trouble as it is, do we really need to increase that trouble by giving them another common thing to bear arms around? I say we don't. Let him rot in prison, sure he'll be wasting our tax dollars, and he'll probably have a pretty nice stay, but he won't be causing any trouble and he can spend a nice long time waiting for his eventual doom and on top of that we won't be giving the Islamic world something to rally around. I say everything works out in the end. Now Sadam and Osama on the other hand they're a different story.