In an Orlando courtroom this morning, a 12-person jury, after three days of deliberation, found Noor Salman, the widow of Pulse attacker Omar Mateen, not guilty on all charges. Salman had been accused of providing material support of terrorism, based on the accusation that she aided her deceased husband in the 2016 Pulse attack, as well as obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to the FBI. She will now be a free woman. As The Intercept has been reporting, the prosecution of Salman was bizarre and dubious from the start. Salman has no history of any political or religious radicalism, and was a victim of her husband’s violent abuse, not his partner or collaborator. Worse, Justice Department prosecutors got caught lying to the court, by telling the judge — when successfully demanding that Salman be held for the last year without bail — that she had “cased” the Pulse nightclub with her husband, an assertion the FBI quickly determined was false. DOJ prosecutors also hid the fact that Omar’s father, Seddique Mateen, had been an FBI informant since 2005. It now seems clear that the FBI did not previously arrest the younger Mateen in 2013, after they investigated him, out of deference to his father, with whom they were working directly. Salman’s lawyers suggested that the reason for prosecuting Salman was to scapegoat her for the attack.

Salman, pictured on the right, had never gone to Pulse, nor had her husband until the night of the attack. Indeed, it became conclusively clear at the trial that, contrary to initial reports, not only had Mateen never been to Pulse, but he also chose it at random only after he found his original targets — including the Disney Springs shopping complex and other nearby tourist attractions — too fortified to attack. Targeting LGBT people was not part of his motive ; allegiance to the Islamic State and a perceived need to retaliate for the U.S. killing of Muslim civilians abroad was. Evidence demonstrates that he chose Pulse randomly without even knowing it catered to the gay community. As Huffington Post’s Melissa Jeltsen put it, after reporting daily from Salman’s trial, “Everything we’ve heard in court suggests Mateen picked Pulse randomly — not because of animus towards the LGBT community.” It is hard to overstate what a rare event this acquittal is. To begin with, the DOJ’s prosecution rested almost exclusively on a confession they got Salman to sign after many hours of detained interrogation on the morning after the attack. That “confession” was not something that Salman wrote herself, but rather one that FBI agents wrote for her based on their claims about what she said during the interrogation (an interrogation that they chose not to record). Despite all the science and data showing how often the FBI coerces false confessions — by preying on the vulnerabilities and duress of people after a crime is committed (testimony showed that Salman has a low IQ and resides at the high end of suggestibility ratings, and was threatened with the loss of her young son) — it is exceedingly rare for juries to acquit a defendant who signed such a statement. Yet jurors obviously concluded that the statement the FBI induced her to sign was unreliable. That conclusion was certainly due, in large part, to the fact that the FBI itself concluded that key parts of the “confession” they had her sign — including the claim that she had “cased” Pulse with her husband — turned out to be demonstrably false. But the shocking rarity of this verdict extends far beyond the limited issue of coerced false confessions. As someone who has covered the issue of post-9/11 civil liberties erosions going back to the Bush administration, I’ve come to automatically expect that any charges relating to terrorism — especially when lodged against a Muslim defendant — will result in a conviction no matter how weak and manipulative the prosecution’s case is. Between the pro-prosecution judges who now fill the federal court system, the ease of exploiting American jurors’ anti-Muslim sentiments, and the extremely broad parameters of terrorism laws, the deck is stacked against defendants in terrorism cases — especially Muslim defendants such as Salman. The data confirms the validity of this expectation. In a two-year project, The Intercept collected and analyzed profiles of the 850 terrorism defendants prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice since 9/11, and it gives the full picture. The note at the top reveals how overzealous the prosecutions have been: “The U.S. government has prosecuted 850 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never even got close to committing an act of violence.”