LITTLE ROCK — Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad is a terrorist, a man “turned into a weapon” in the Middle East, his attorney told a Pulaski County circuit judge Tuesday while openly questioning the 25-year-old man’s sanity.
Those defense claims were greeted with eye-rolling skepticism by prosecutors, who suggested that the claims were likely maneuvers to delay or derail Muhammad’s coming death-penalty trial.
In 19 months of court proceedings, Tuesday’s hearing was the first time defense attorney Claiborne Ferguson definitively applied the terrorism label to the Muslim convert.
He made the claim in an unsuccessful challenge to the Circuit Court’s jurisdiction to try Muhammad, whose capital-murder trial is 2 1/2 months away. Ferguson says the case should be shifted to federal court.
The hearing appeared to pave the way for at least one more hearing before the Feb. 23 trial.
Muhammad of Memphis, who was formerly known as Carlos Leon Bledsoe, is charged with capital murder and 11 other counts in the June 2009 shooting that killed Army Pvt. Justin Long and wounded a fellow private, Quinton Ezeagwula, in front of a west Little Rock recruiting station.
In a series of letters and interviews with police, media representatives, prosecutors and doctors, Muhammad, who was arrested less than 15 minutes after the shooting, has admitted to being the gunman. He has called the shooting a “jihadi” attack in retribution for U.S. military policies that he said target Muslims in the Middle East.
At Tuesday’s hour-long proceeding, Judge Herb Wright not only rejected Ferguson’s motion challenging the court’s jurisdiction over his client but also threw out Ferguson’s request to force an FBI agent to disclose whatever the agency knows about Muhammad’s activities in the United States and in the Middle East in the days before the Little Rock shootings.
With chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson promising that no federal agents will be called as witnesses, the judge said he would bar their testimony.
“If that’s the position they take, I won’t allow any federal witnesses,” Wright said at the hearing.
Johnson said prosecutors won’t seek to enter evidence of two unsuccessful attacks that Muhammad said he tried before the Little Rock shootings: the attempted firebombing of a Nashville rabbi and an aborted shooting at a Kentucky recruiting center.
Johnson told the judge that prosecutors will limit their accusations of wrongdoing against Muhammad to crimes in Pulaski County, which include attacks on jailers and fellow prisoners.
But Muhammad’s lawyers argued that to prepare his defense against execution, they need to know what the FBI knows about Muhammad, particularly about his interrogation in a Yemeni prison.
“What turned my client into what he is today happened somewhere between Nashville and Yemen,” Ferguson said. “Everyone is dancing around the issue that my client is a terrorist.”
With U.S. Attorney Jane Duke refusing to allow the FBI to surrender any information, Wright said, he can’t force federal investigators to turn over anything.
“I don’t have any control or jurisdiction over the FBI,” Wright told Ferguson.
Ferguson said he would file an administrative challenge with the federal Department of Justice seeking to have Duke’s decision overturned. Duke attended Tuesday’s hearing but didn’t speak. In a court filing, federal prosecutors suggested that the defense motion was a fishing expedition to support efforts to have the case moved to federal court.
Federal court is the only appropriate venue to try Muhammad, Ferguson argued, because it is the only place his client can invoke war and humanitarian laws in his defense. State courts don’t have the authority to consider those laws that derive from international treaties, he said.
“The state won’t call him a terrorist because they want to prosecute him in state court. He engaged what he perceived as the enemy here,” Ferguson told the judge. “The federal system is a better place to try this.”
In light of Wright’s refusal to order the FBI to cooperate, Ferguson said, he will be filing a motion to dismiss the charges - his third in the case - on the grounds that Muhammad’s right to a defense has been thwarted.
Ferguson also accused federal investigators of withholding information about his client gleaned from Muhammad’s computer. Ferguson said his efforts to force the FBI to turn over information about his client would not be necessary in federal court.
He argued that Duke’s recalcitrance proved his claim that Muhammad should be tried in federal court. But prosecutors argued that Muhammad’s motive doesn’t matter.
“He’s not charged with any act of terrorism,” Johnson told the judge. “Whether he is [a terrorist] or isn’t is not the point. The point is state statutes were violated.”
Johnson not only disputed that Muhammad is a terrorist but also suggested that defense attorneys are playing up that claim merely to placate Muhammad, who has grown disgruntled with their efforts and has previously threatened to fire them. Muhammad didn’t publicly claim an al-Qaida affiliation until he had been jailed seven months.
“What defense counsel is doing is latching onto the notion by the defendant that he wants to be regarded as a terrorist,” Johnson told the judge.
Muhammad’s attorneys also openly questioned his sanity after Muhammad told the judge that he wanted to plead guilty to the charges against him.
“I don’t think he’s competent based on contacts I’ve had with him over the past couple of months,” co-counsel Patrick Benca told the judge. “In my heart of hearts, I think this guy needs to be evaluated.”
Benca and Ferguson denied that they were attempting to force a delay in the trial. Both said Muhammad has stopped cooperating with them over the past two months and has refused to speak with a doctor they hired as part of a potential challenge of a July diagnosis by state doctors that he is competent to stand trial.
Muhammad called the attorneys liars, objecting to the claim that he has seen a private doctor and disputing Benca’s description to the judge of weekly visits with him at the Pulaski County jail. Ferguson described a “marked” psychological decline in Muhammad in the past two months.
“I don’t feel comfortable right now with his decision making,” Ferguson said. “I’ve seen a deterioration that’s getting worse.”
Prosecutors said they would object to a new mental evaluation if the testing resulted in a delay in Muhammad’s trial.Wright said he didn’t want to shift the proceedings if at all possible, but he ordered the second evaluation, saying a recent Arkansas Supreme Court ruling required him to accommodate “good-faith” defense requests whenever they are made.
But Wright agreed to limit the scope of the psychiatric review to the allegations that Muhammad attacked a jailer who was escorting him to the shower in October. Wright also sided with prosecutors in telling the defense that the attorneys needed to provide a more detailed description of Muhammad’s mental problems to substantiate his order.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/22/2010