SENTENCED.

The article comments on the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the self-proclaimed hijacker of September 11, 2001. His connections to the specifics of the terrorist plot was tenuous or nonexistent. On the day of the attacks, he was in jail awaiting deportation and his story kept on changing in the course of nearly four and a half years of court proceedings. What kept the trial going was the U.S. government's fixation on pursuing death penalty. Any execution degrades the society that decrees it and demoralizes the government employees who are assigned to carry it out.