Keep in mind that this concerns a man whose only reason for still being around is due to the fact that he failed in his quest to blow himself, everyone traveling to the US with him and the plane they were all on to pieces.
Reid was arrested in 2001 for attempting to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with 197 passengers and crew on board. Why had Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to renew his security measures, kept in place since 2002?According to court documents filed in a 2007 civil lawsuit against the government, Reid claimed that SAMs violated his First Amendment right of free speech and free exercise of religion. In a hand-written complaint, he asserted that he was being illegally prevented from performing daily “group prayers in a manner prescribed by my religion.” Yet the list of Reid’s potential fellow congregants at ADX Florence reads like a Who’s Who of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members: Ramzi Yousef and his three co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; “Millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam; “Dirty bomber” Jose Padilla; Wadih el-Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s personal secretary, convicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that killed 247 people. - WSJ
This is an idiotic situation that that the Government has put itself in. Richard Reid should have faced the death penalty for what he had planned to do, especially given that it was only blind luck (and dare I say an Act of God) that prevented him from being successful.
Surely, he would have been eligible for the death penalty had he killed anyone during his act of terrorism. Unfortunately, his plans were to die in the process. Despite being stopped, he should have been tried according to his intent, not the final result. He should have been executed and as a side benefit we would not have to be dealing with how to confine him in prison or worry about who he might talk to or who he might drive to the cause of terrorism, not to mention worry about whether the Government is violating his rights or not. Instead we get to worry about all those things as well as a surely have to deal with a growing group of supporters within the population who will eventually call for his release because he has reformed himself while in prison.
Better to put him and all the others in a box. They do not deserve to live. Keeping them alive just invites trouble.
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