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Noor Salman Acquitted in Pulse Nightclub Shooting Noor Salman Acquitted in Pulse Nightclub Shooting
(about 1 hour later)
ORLANDO, Fla. — Noor Salman, the widow of the man who gunned down dozens of people at the Pulse nightclub two years ago, was found not guilty by a federal jury on Friday of helping her husband carry out a terrorist attack in the name of the Islamic State. ORLANDO, Fla. — The acquittal by a federal jury of Noor Salman, the widow of the man who gunned down dozens of people at the Pulse nightclub two years ago, handed federal prosecutors on Friday the rarest of defeats: a loss in a terrorism case.
Jurors acquitted Ms. Salman on charges of aiding and abetting the commission of a terrorist act in the 2016 mass shooting and also found her not guilty of obstructing justice. She had been accused of giving misleading statements to law enforcement officers who interviewed her after the massacre, the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. At the time, it was also the deadliest mass shooting in modern United States history. The outcome was even more striking because the not-guilty verdict came from jurors in Orlando, Fla., where Omar Mateen’s rampage left 49 people dead and 53 others injured, the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Ms. Salman, 31, had faced a sentence of up to life in prison if convicted. Jurors unanimously rejected government charges that Ms. Salman had helped her husband plan his violent assault in the name of the Islamic State — a narrative countered by her family’s claims that she was kept in the dark about her husband’s secrets and was home sleeping when the attack occurred.
The verdict marked a rare setback for federal prosecutors, who have a strong record of winning convictions in terrorism trials — even more so because Ms. Salman had faced a jury in Orlando, Fla., the city where her husband’s shooting spree left 49 people dead and 53 others injured. To blame for the government’s defeat, said defense lawyers and legal experts who closely followed the trial, was a flimsy circumstantial case that ultimately was unable to persuade jurors during the eight days of trial.
The jury deliberated for a little more than 12 hours over three days before reaching their verdict Friday morning. Testimony from an F.B.I. agent revealed that prosecutors knew early on, but did not reveal, that one of their crucial initial pieces of evidence — that Ms. Salman had admitted driving by the nightclub with her husband in the days before the attack — most likely did not happen.
Ms. Salman wiped tears from her eyes after the verdict on the first charge was read. By the time the judge’s clerk announced the final “not guilty,” Ms. Salman openly sobbed. So did a cousin and two uncles, seated two rows behind her in the courtroom. One uncle nearly leapt out of his seat. Ms. Salman, her face red and blotchy with emotion, turned around to look at them. Prosecutors also faltered when they argued that Ms. Salman had created an alibi for her husband the night of the shooting, telling Mr. Mateen’s mother that he was out to dinner with a friend identified only as Nemo. But that line was Mr. Mateen’s own lie to his wife, defense lawyers argued. They put Nemo on the stand, over prosecutors’ objections, to testify that he knew Mr. Mateen had used him in the past as a cover story to cheat on his wife.
Defense attorneys hugged Ms. Salman. They, too, wept. “The more we learned, the better Noor Salman looked,” Charles D. Swift, one of her lawyers, told reporters after the verdict was announced.
Across the courtroom, Pulse victims and their families sat in stone-faced silence. The jury of seven women and five men deliberated a little more than 12 hours before acquitting Ms. Salman on charges of aiding and abetting the commission of a terrorist act and of obstructing justice. She had been accused of giving misleading statements to law enforcement officers who interviewed her after the massacre.
“It was a difficult case for all sides involved,” Judge Paul G. Byron of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida said. Late Friday, the jury foreman said in a statement to The Orlando Sentinel that the verdict did not mean jurors thought Ms. Salman was unaware of Mr. Mateen’s plans.
In a brief statement to reporters outside the courthouse, Sarah C. Sweeney, an assistant United States attorney who helped prosecute the case, thanked jurors for their work. “We respect their verdict,” she said. “On the contrary, we were convinced she did know,” the foreman told The Sentinel, asking to remain anonymous and saying he was speaking on his own behalf. “She may not have known what day, or what location, but she knew. However, we were not tasked with deciding if she was aware of a potential attack. The charges were aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice.”
The families of the victims left the courthouse as a group, some of them wearing dark sunglasses. They declined to comment. And on those charges, he said, the jury was presented with “no option” but to acquit.
Ms. Salman’s family members said they were overjoyed by the verdict but continued to grieve for the Pulse victims. In federal court, where terrorism defendants often accept guilty pleas before going to trial, prosecutors rarely lose cases. A report last year by the Center for National Security at Fordham University School of Law found that, while Islamic State-related cases are more likely to go to trial than federal cases in general, every case that was resolved between March 2014 and August 2017 resulted in a conviction. The national average conviction rate is 92.5 percent, according to the report.
“I feel so sad for them,” said Susan Adieh, Ms. Salman’s cousin. She added that a guilty verdict would not have brought back the dead but would have forced Ms. Salman to pay for her husband’s mass murder. “We can’t commit another innocent person as well.” But prosecutors generally have been cautious about filing charges against possible accomplices in terrorism cases. Though an accomplice is sometimes the only one left alive to prosecute, such cases can be difficult to prove.
“I want to say thank you: Thank you, Lord,” Al Salman, one of Ms. Salman’s uncles, told reporters outside the courtroom. He said he looked forward to taking his niece home to her son, now 5 and living with relatives in California: “That’s the only thing she has in her life, her son.” “Prosecutors have got a duty not to be caught up in hysteria,” said William N. Nettles, who was the United States attorney in South Carolina when a white supremacist killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015 and successfully prosecuted a man who had withheld information about that attack.
Al Salman also said he intended to hire a therapist to help Ms. Salman rebuild her life. “I don’t know how she’s going to make up for two years,” he said. He said prosecutors must guard against allowing public emotion to influence their decisions.
“I said that Day 1, that she’s innocent,” Mr. Salman said. “I came here to tell you I told you so.” “The federal government should never lose a case,” Mr. Nettles said. “Prosecutors should never lose. They pick the fight, they pick the day the fight happens, they’ve got the best investigative capabilities in the world. It should always be an embarrassment for the government to lose.”
Ms. Salman was released later in the day and left in a car with one of her lawyers. She covered her face in her hands as reporters plied her with questions. Later, a family spokeswoman, Susan Clary, tweeted a photo of Ms. Salman with her defense team. After the verdict, two of Ms. Salman’s defense lawyers, Charles D. Swift and Linda Moreno, said in an interview that prosecutors had offered their client a plea deal in the weeks leading up to the trial but she had refused to accept it, insisting on her innocence.
“The family is elated. Noor can go home now to her son, Zak, resume her life and try to pick up the pieces from two years in jail,” Ms. Clary said in a statement read to reporters. “We really hope the best for her future and want people to know that she is not guilty. She is innocent. For those people who still think that there’s a question — there is no question. A judge has decided.” The 31-year-old defendant wiped tears from her eyes after the verdict on the first charge was read. By the time the judge’s clerk finished, Ms. Salman openly sobbed, hugging her lawyers and burying her face in their arms. They, too, wept. She later left the courthouse with Fritz Scheller, another one of her lawyers.
Barbara Poma, the Pulse nightclub owner who launched the OnePulse Foundation to establish a memorial to the victims of the massacre, said the verdict “cannot and will not divide us.” A spokeswoman for the Salman family said Ms. Salman plans to return to California, where she had been living before her arrest in January 2017, to be with her 5-year-old son. She had faced a sentence of up to life in prison if convicted.
“Those of us directly affected by this tragedy must find peace in our hearts and remember that he was the one who pulled the trigger that night. He was the perpetrator, and he should not have one more minute of power over our lives,” she said in a statement. “I don’t know how she’s going to make up for two years,” said Al Salman, one of her uncles, who sat two rows behind his niece during the trial. He said he intends to hire a therapist to help Ms. Salman rebuild her life.
From the start, Ms. Salman had insisted she had nothing to do with her husband Omar Mateen’s rampage. Prosecutors built a convincing case that Mr. Mateen methodically made arrangements for the attack, apparently inspired by the ISIS propaganda he obsessively consumed online. But they were less successful in tying Ms. Salman to his actions. Families of the Pulse victims sat in stone-faced silence as the verdict was announced. They walked out of the federal courthouse in downtown Orlando as a group, some of them wearing dark sunglasses, without saying a word.
Prosecutors relied on a confession Ms. Salman gave F.B.I. agents in which she admitted she had known about her husband acquiring weapons, watching Islamic State videos and discussing possible locations in apparent preparation for the June 12, 2016, attack. Defense lawyers argued that Ms. Salman’s statement, obtained after more than 11 hours of questioning without a lawyer present, amounted to a false confession. Ms. Salman told investigators that she and Mr. Mateen scouted Pulse as a target, yet investigators found no evidence to corroborate that. After news of the verdict spread, a small group gathered outside Pulse, which has remained shuttered since the shooting, holding signs declaring, “We will not let hate win.”
“She was a suspect, and they wanted to get a confession — except that she was still denying that she knew anything,” a defense lawyer, Charles D. Swift, said during his closing argument on Wednesday. “Those of us directly affected by this tragedy must find peace in our hearts and remember that he was the one who pulled the trigger that night,” Barbara Poma, the nightclub owner and founder of a foundation for the victims, said in a statement, referring to Mr. Mateen. “This verdict cannot and will not divide us.”
Jurors were asked to decide whether Ms. Salman had aided and abetted her husband’s support of a foreign terrorist organization. The prosecutors, James D. Mandolfo and Sara C. Sweeney, declined to comment, other than to thank jurors for their work and say they respected their decision.
James D. Mandolfo, an assistant United States attorney, acknowledged during his opening statement on March 14 that the case against Ms. Salman was not built around a single incriminating fact but rather on the “totality” of evidence regarding her support of Mr. Mateen. From the start, Ms. Salman had insisted she had nothing to do with her husband’s rampage. The prosecution built a convincing case that Mr. Mateen methodically made arrangements for the attack, apparently inspired by the Islamic State propaganda he obsessively consumed online — including a video he watched weeks before the shooting urging bloodshed against Americans during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Delivering the prosecution’s closing argument on Wednesday, Ms. Sweeney pointed to unusually high spending and cash withdrawals by the couple in the 11 days leading up the shooting, totaling more than the $30,500 Mr. Mateen made in a year as a security guard. The couple, whose son was 3 at the time, also added Ms. Salman as a death beneficiary to Mr. Mateen’s bank account, where they expected to soon receive a federal income tax refund. The burden on prosecutors after that was high: They had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Salman knowingly and willfully helped or tried to help Mr. Mateen commit an act that would provide material support to the Islamic State. Merely being his wife or unwittingly assisting her husband was not enough, said Joshua L. Dratel, a New York lawyer experienced in defending terrorism cases.
But the jury of seven women and five men appeared to have been persuaded by the defense, which cast Ms. Salman as a naïve woman of limited intelligence, kept in the dark by a scheming husband who cheated on her, knew she did not share his radicalized views and did not need her assistance to carry out his deadly plot. Her lawyers argued that Mr. Mateen had no reason to ask his wife for help — and Ms. Salman had no reason to provide it. “You have to share the intent of the actor,” Mr. Dratel said. “You have to do something to make the crime succeed — not do something that makes the crime succeed without knowing that the crime is going to occur. You have to have both of those elements.”
“Why would Omar Mateen confide in Noor, a woman he clearly had no respect for?” Linda Moreno, a defense lawyer, asked the jury. Prosecutors did not have to prove a motive, though Ms. Sweeney, an assistant United States attorney, said in her closing argument on Wednesday that Ms. Salman could have aided Mr. Mateen out of love, money or spite. But while Mr. Mateen’s internet browsing and social media records showed intense radicalization, there was no similar history for Ms. Salman. In fact, twice on Facebook she criticized Islamic terrorists, at one point calling them bad Muslims.
In the hours before the attack, Ms. Salman made plans to visit family and friends in California, telephoning them to ask about arrangements and presents, and browsed for leather jackets online. She had dinner at Applebee’s and was home in her pajamas, texting her husband about his whereabouts late into the night. “In today’s world, to have a case like that where you have access to all the social media, you have access to the phones, you have access to the computers — all of that, and you don’t have a specific piece of evidence pointing to her intent? You don’t have a case,” Mr. Dratel said.
Ms. Salman did not testify during the trial. On Wednesday, after eight days of witness testimony, Judge Byron asked Ms. Salman if remaining silent had been her own decision. “Yes,” she responded. In her supposed confession, Ms. Salman told F.B.I. agents that she and Mr. Mateen had scouted Pulse as a target for the June 12, 2016, attack, yet investigators apparently knew just days later that there was no evidence to corroborate that. That false statement in her confession called into question the rest of what she told law enforcement over more than 11 hours of questioning without a lawyer present. The F.B.I. made no audio or video recordings of the interview. The jury foreman told The Sentinel that he wished a recording had been available.
The trial, which drew Pulse victims and their families to the federal courthouse in downtown Orlando, included graphic video of the nightclub massacre recorded by surveillance cameras, police body cameras and victims’ cellphones. “Twenty years ago, not everybody who you ran into had a digital recorder in their pocket, and we didn’t have ‘CSI’ shows, and we didn’t expect to have everything on tape for us to see,” said David S. Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who is now a defense lawyer. “But that’s what we expect now. If there isn’t a picture, it didn’t happen. So the fact that they didn’t record the confession helped to raise this reasonable doubt as to what was being said.”
After prosecutors rested their case, they disclosed to the defense that Mr. Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, had been an F.B.I. informer at various times from January 2005 to the time of the attack. He is now under criminal investigation for financial transfers to Turkey and Afghanistan he made shortly before the shooting. The final coup for the defense came during the prosecution’s closing argument, when Ms. Sweeney for the first time suggested that the reason Ms. Salman told F.B.I. agents that she and Mr. Mateen had driven by Pulse was because she incorrectly thought the nightclub was at the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment complex, formerly known as Downtown Disney, which the couple did visit.
Closing arguments from both the prosecution and the defense centered on Ms. Salman’s three statements to the F.B.I. No audio or video recordings were made of the statements, and she wrote only a portion of one of them herself; the rest were dictated to an F.B.I. agent and initialed by Ms. Salman. Offering an especially chilling detail, Ms. Sweeney suggested that Mr. Mateen bought a baby carriage and doll at a Walmart the night before the massacre so that he could conceal his AR-15 assault rifle and draw no suspicion as he walked toward Disney Springs, which prosecutors believe was his original intended target.
In them, she admitted she should have reported her husband’s suspicious activities. “I wish I had done the right thing, but my fear held me back,” she wrote. “I wish I had been more truthful.” Prosecutors had never before assigned any importance to the stroller, which Mr. Mateen bought alone, while Ms. Salman was miles away, shopping with his credit card. Mr. Swift said in an interview that it showed his client was not in the loop and her husband had intentionally kept his plot from her.
A defense expert testified that Ms. Salman was highly susceptible to intimidation. Ms. Moreno, the defense attorney, suggested Ms. Salman’s words, particularly about casing Pulse with Mr. Mateen, had been “planted.” GPS data from her cellphone later showed she had not driven by the nightclub with her husband. “Doesn’t it make more sense to got to the Walmart with his wife for a baby carriage?” he asked. “If she is aiding and abetting, then why isn’t she with him? If she was there, she might have questioned him: Why do we need a baby carriage? Their kid did not need a stroller.”
The defense contended that Ms. Salman mentioned Pulse under duress because investigators sought someone to blame in the case. But on Wednesday, Ms. Sweeney offered a new explanation: Ms. Salman incorrectly thought Pulse was at the Disney World theme park, which the couple did visit. The defense asked for a mistrial this week after prosecutors disclosed that Mr. Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, had been an F.B.I. informer at various times from January 2005 to the time of the attack. He is now under criminal investigation for financial transfers to Turkey and Afghanistan he made shortly before the shooting. Defense lawyers argued that the elder Mateen’s relationship with the F.B.I. should have been disclosed early on in the case.
“He was not intending to go to the Pulse nightclub,” Ms. Sweeney said. “Instead, the target of his attack was Disney.” “Mistakes were made by everybody, but nobody would admit to them,” Mr. Swift said. “Mistakes were made by the interrogators, and by the original people who looked at Mateen, and the prosecution. At every level.”
Offering an especially chilling detail, Ms. Sweeney suggested that Mr. Mateen bought a baby carriage and doll at a Walmart the night before the massacre so that he could conceal his AR-15 assault rifle and draw no suspicion as he walked toward what prosecutors believe was his intended target, the Disney Springs shopping and entertainment complex, formerly known as Downtown Disney. “Salman was a solution to all their mistakes,” he added. “But the jury didn’t buy it.”
On the night of the attack, Mr. Mateen went to the House of Blues at Disney Springs, GPS data and surveillance footage showed. Spooked by the heavy security, he got back in his rental van and searched for downtown Orlando nightclubs on Google. The second hit was Pulse, a gay nightclub with a popular Saturday Latin night.
“It’s a horrible, random, senseless killing by a monster. But it wasn’t preplanned,” Mr. Swift said. “And if he didn’t know, she couldn’t know.”
After the verdict, defense lawyers pointed to the prosecution’s Disney explanation as a crucial indication that the government was struggling to make its case.
“The more we learned, the better Noor Salman looked,” said Mr. Swift, who criticized the F.B.I. for failing to record its interview with her after the shooting. “It is ridiculous that they don’t,” he said. “The process being followed by the F.B.I. is antiquated.”