3rd trial looms for alleged Sears Tower attack plotters

MIAMI - Federal prosecutors will try for a third time to persuade jurors that six men from an impoverished Miami neighborhood were a blossoming al-Qaida cell bent on destroying Chicago’s Sears Tower to help ignite a war against the United States.
Prosecutors have indicated that they might change their approach for this week’s trial after two juries didn’t buy their case that the group’s leader, 34-year-old Narseal Batiste, was trying to orchestrate a grandiose bloodbath. Jurors in both mistrials said they were skeptical Batiste could have chronic money woes and difficulty keeping a simple construction business afloat while at the same time planning to overthrow the government.
Some 30 months have passed since FBI agents swooped down on a Miami warehouse to arrest Batiste and his followers in a case former President George W. Bush’s administration pointed to as an example of its policy of preventing terror plots in the earliest stages possible.
But trials in 2007 and 2008 ended in hung juries for the six, and a seventh man was acquitted after the first go-around. Another mistrial would make dropping the case more likely, a decision that would rest with President Barack Obama’s new administration.
The two hung juries “certainly raise some doubt about whether a jury is going to reach a consensus in the future,” said Douglas Keene, president of the American Society of Trial Consultants. “They do not represent the level of threat that people assume attaches to terrorists.”