By Josh Green
RALEIGH, N.C. -
A status conference Friday in the case against seven men accused of plotting “violent jihad” revealed just how complicated and expensive the trial will be.
U.S. Government prosecutors have yet to come to an agreement with public defenders about who will pay for the hours of work it will take to transcribe audio and video recordings relating to the case. Some include several hours that are not in English. Altogether, there are 750 hours of video and audio tapes involved in this case. Defense attorneys said the cost of transcribing those recordings is already up to $60,000 and the work is “not nearly finished.”
“Fortunately – the federal public defender’s office is bearing most of that cost out of a fund that’s given to them from Washington, D.C. called Litigation Technical Support,” said Doug McCullough, who is the defense attorney appointed for Ziyad Yaghi. “It’s unusual that they have to have those kind of costs absorbed so I think that we’re able to meet the cost of getting things done. That’s not really going to be a burden on the viability of our defense.”
Defense attorneys also talked about using electronic voice identification services to make sure the recordings on those tapes are who FBI agents say they are.
“What the defense is looking at is perhaps the belief that the government has some of this stuff done already,” McCullough said. “When I was assistant U.S. attorney myself – we had an 80-day wire tap. During the course of a wire tap – the government was identifying on a daily basis who the speakers were in this. We were reacting to that wire tap.”
“Presumably, they were doing the same thing. But now we’re in court arguing about these matters as though the government has no idea what’s on the tape either except for the index. Some of the defense counsel are just a little skeptical.”
Prosecutors did not want to comment outside of court Friday.
The mounds of evidence attorneys must go through comes after a 5-year investigation from the federal government. The original indictment charges that Daniel Boyd, Zakariya Boyd, Hysen Sherifi, Dlyan Boyd, Anes Subasic, Ziyad Yaghi, and Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan were involved in a conspiracy to provide material to support terrorists. The men are accused of conspiring to murder, kidnap, maim and injure people and property overseas.
The terrorism trial is set to start September 20.
