“I think it shows how tarnished the government’s credibility is here in our community,” said Bruce J. Winick, a professor at the University of Miami law school. “I think this was a case of premature prosecution. They should have surveilled more carefully and for longer to see if this plot was really going anywhere or if it was simply a bunch of poor unfortunates rising to the flavorful bait of someone who’s spreading around $50,000.”

Oath-taking to a terrorist organization is relevant evidence, but in and of itself, it is an act protected by the First Amendment, said Winick, explaining that the jury had to decide if the defendants would have come up with such a plot on their own. “It was like a little movie put together by a government informant.”

The verdict yesterday in the Liberty City 7 terrorism case, in which the jury acquitted one defendant and hung on conspiracy charges for the other six, was a vindication of the jury system. We hope that juries will bring the common sense judgment of the community to the ajudication of criminal charges, and this is precisely what happened here.

A paid government informant initiated this “plot” to blow up government buildings, and rented a warehouse with government money as the stage for the plot. Seven hapless, unemployed construction workers, members of the Moorish Science Temple, were enlisted as the actors in the plot, lured in by the prospect of conning the informant out of the $50,000 he promised to deliver. Was this a genuine act of terrorism nipped in the bud or a B-movie farce involving an attempt to con a conman?

The evidence that it was a home-grown terrorist cell, about to blow up government buildings, as the prosecution claimed, was rather thin. It consisted mainly of a video of the men repeating an oath to Bin Laden that the informant had staged and videotaped. As one prosecutor conceded, the plot was more aspirational than operational. But was it operational at all, and was the aspiration more than an attempt to obtain the money that the informant was ready to spread around? The defense claimed entrapment, and the government was unable to prove to the jury’s satisfaction that these marginal unfortunates were predisposed to carry through on the alleged conspiracy. There simply was no reality to this plot, and the jury cut through the government’s rhetoric and fearmongering.

Why didn’t the government, if it thought this was the real thing, simply surveille the defendants closely to see where it was headed? In fact, the “plot” already was breaking up, and it was reasonably clear that nothing further would have happened. The government, however, justified its premature indictment as preemptive action, something required in the post-9/11 world. However, the terrorism fear card no longer seems to play in the way it did some years ago. The public has grown cynical about President Bush’s war in Iraq and has come to see government warnings about domestic terrorism to be overblown. The failure of this and other recent terrorism prosecutions shows that the times have changed.

What really drove the Liberty City 7 prosecution may more likely have been the politics of the 2006 mid-term election than the reality of a home grown terrorist plot. The indictment was announced by attorney general Gonzalez with great fanfare just months before the election, and at a time when the President’s political fortunes and that of his party were falling. In retrospect, it seems to have been another attempt to play the 9/11 fear card that the President had succeeded so well with in prior years. But the years have passed, and the jury had the good sense to see the reality of the charges for what they were.