Excerpt:
Their 2008 convictions have been upheld on appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the case. So five men convicted of illegally routing millions of dollars to Hamas through a Dallas-based charity are trying the only ploy they have left – blaming their lawyers and asking for new trials.
A new attorney claims the five former Holy Land Foundation (HLF) officials filed a petition in October claiming that, if not for the mistakes made by their counsel, Mohamed El-Mezain, Shukri Abu Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh would be free men. Instead, they are serving sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years in federal prison.
The case turned on the issue of whether West Bank charities, known as zakat committees, were controlled by Hamas, attorney Gary A. Udashen argued in filing court papers last October seeking to toss out the verdict. Defense attorneys failed to call witnesses from the seven zakat committees named in the indictment to testify at trial. He submitted new affidavits from 13 people who said their committees were independent and not controlled by Hamas as prosecutors argued. That ineffective assistance of counsel merits vacating the verdict, Udashen wrote, because if those witnesses testified, "the jury would almost certainly have found these defendants not guilty."