The Standard Result in a Terrorism Case

The verdicts get overturned on appeal.

This one is a little stronger than most. Usually, an overturned case gets sent back to the same judge; the appellate court's opinion is the "do over and here is how" instruction to the trial judge.

This time, however, the case will be assigned to a new trial judge. When that happens, that is a real dope-slap to the trial judge. The message is: "You fucked this one up so badly that we cannot trust you to do it right."

It seems to me that most of these high-profile terrorism cases are falling apart on appeal. That tells me that the cases are political, not criminal, and the appellate judges are not about to let the Tsar of the Baboons and his henchmen in the Department of Justice turn the American legal system into a system of Soviet-style show trials.