If you would like to know what was the most forceful argument in the appeal of the two Albany Muslims convicted of supporting terrorism, I direct you to my column in the print version of today's Daily Gazette, which you can obtain for the modest cost of 50 cents at your nearest convenience store.
Those of you who have 50 cents, stop reading now.
For the benefit of those who do not have 50 cents, and for no one else, I will reveal that the most forceful argument was made on behalf of Mohammed Hossain, pizza-shop-owner, that he was not legally predisposed to commit the crime that the government set him up to commit.
His lawyer, Kevin Luibrand, cited Supreme Court precedent that in order for the government to induce someone to commit a crime, that person must be predisposed to commit it, as for example a drug dealer is shown to be predisposed either by previous convictions or by surveillance. Then it's OK to send an undercover officer to make what's called a controlled buy.
Mohammed Hossain was minding his own pizza business and didn't know money-laundering from nanotechnology when the government's agent provocateur started working on him, and there are plenty of words of his on surveillance tape to show it. He was thus entrapped, in the legal sense, and his conviction is null and void.
If I were one of the three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals who heard this argument the other day, there's no question which way I would vote.