Local media is reporting that the convictions against five leaders of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) for financing Hamas were upheld by a Texas judicial panel. According to a Dallas Morning News report:
07 December 2011 10:57 AM Today a Fifth Circuit judicial panel released a highly anticipated opinion affirming the convictions against the five organizers of the former Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation on charges that they conspired to funnel money to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.The first trial in 2007 ended in a hung jury, but the retrial the next year resulted in across-the-board convictions. The HLF, once the largest Muslim charity in the United States, had been under investigation for years before it was shut down by the Bush administration months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.In their appeals, defense attorneys argued that the government’s use of anonymous Israeli witnesses and other issues resulted in an unfair outcome for their clients, two of whom are serving 65-year sentences.In today’s opinion, Fifth Circuit Judge Carolyn Dineen King, writing on behalf of colleagues Emilio M. Garza and James E. Graves, Jr., noted: “While no trial is perfect, this one included, we conclude from our review of the record, briefs, and oral argument, that the defendants were fairly convicted. For the reasons explained below, therefore, we affirm the district court’s judgments of conviction of the individual defendants. We dismiss the appeal of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.”
The ruling can be found here.
Previous posts covered the trial and convictions of the HLF defendants.
The HLF was the largest Palestinian charity in the U.S. and was intimately associated with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood whose organizations consistently supported HLF throughout the two trials. Among the more significant developments during the history of the prosecution was the public release of a cache of U.S. Brotherhood documents discovered in the backyard of one of the defendants that revealed the previously unknown covert structures of the Brotherhood in the U.S. Also significant was the naming of many of the U.S. Brotherhood leaders and organizations as unindicted coconspirators in the case, a move which is still being fought by those same groups and individuals.