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.
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.
Ms. Salman, 31, had faced a sentence of up to life in prison if convicted.
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.
The jury deliberated for a little more than 12 hours over three days before reaching their verdict Friday morning. 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.
Defense attorneys hugged Ms. Salman. They, too, wept.
Across the courtroom, Pulse victims and their families sat in stone-faced silence.
"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.
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.
The families of the victims left the courthouse as a group, some of them wearing dark sunglasses. They declined to comment.
Ms. Salman's family members said they were overjoyed by the verdict but continued to grieve for the Pulse victims.
"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."
"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."
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.
"I said that Day 1, that she's innocent," Mr. Salman said. "I came here to tell you I told you so."
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.
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.
"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.
Jurors were asked to decide whether Ms. Salman had aided and abetted her husband's support of a foreign terrorist organization.
James D. Mandolfo, an assistant United States attorney, acknowledged during his opening statement on March 14 that the case against Ms. Salmanwas not built around a single incriminating fact but rather on the "totality" of evidence regarding her support of Mr. Mateen.
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.
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.
"Why would Omar Mateen confide in Noor, a woman he clearly had no respect for?" Linda Moreno, a defense lawyer, asked the jury.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
"He was not intending to go to the Pulse nightclub," Ms. Sweeney said. "Instead, the target of his attack was Disney."
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.
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."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/us/noor-salman-pulse-trial-verdict.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
I genuinely have no idea how to feel about this. I mean part of me just wants to say "How could she not know?" but I know thats just an emotional response with the benefit of hindsight.
