In February, a jury found the man they charged with attempted murder of author Salman Rushdie to be guilty. Rushdie was assaulted during a lecture at a literary event in Western New York in 2022. The sharp contrast between the prosecution's expert testimony and the utter lack of it on the defense's side was striking.
Prosecutors in the case against Hadi Matar presented expert evidence to back up their claims. One of the expert witnesses who testified was Brooke Driscoll, a forensic biologist at the Erie County Central Police Services forensic laboratory in Buffalo.
Driscoll spoke about the ways in which preliminary and confirmatory tests of the kind the laboratory conducts on biological samples bound for the laboratory's DNA testing section. She also clarified that her lab does not perform DNA analysis on samples that are associated with a known individual's DNA and that those samples are connected to the commission of a crime.
The trauma surgeon who handled Rushdie's case testified before the jury. He told them that the author's injuries would have been fatal had it not been for the prompt medical attention he received.
The district attorney painstakingly laid out in video form the way that Matar, charged and how Rushdie attempted to dodge the attack as Matar kept the pressure on, and stumbled a few steps upstage, out of the way of the thrusting blade, before falling himself. Matar, the assailant, was shown in video form again and again—as a way of embedding the image in the minds of the jurors—clinging to his victim with one hand while slashing, with a knife, at Rushdie's upper body.
The assailant, as described by Rushdie, wore dark clothing and a facial mask. Rushdie said he was particularly struck by the individual's eyes, which were dark and seemed very ferocious.
The initial effect of the attack hit Sir Salman in his right jaw and neck, making him momentarily think he had taken a punch. But then the blood started soaking through his clothes. "I realized that he was trying to kill me," he recalled, "and that he was doing it by stabbing and slashing with a knife, which for me had the right feel in the moment to be a 'back toward me, forward toward you' kind of maneuver." He put this supposed kerfuffle into the context of a couple of seconds.
The trial's most fundamental facet was determining whether Matar had the intent, or not, to kill Rushdie. Assistant Public Defender Andrew Brautigan made it clear to the jury that the prosecution just could not prove its basic charge: that Matar intended to kill Salman Rushdie. If the charge could not be proven, then, obviously, the prosecution had not met its burden of proof.
"You will agree something terrible occurred involving Mr. Rushdie, but you cannot know what Mr. Matar's deliberate aim was," asserted Brautigan.
In contrast, District Attorney Jason Schmidt recognized the intrinsic problem of figuring out Matar's mental condition. Still, he asserted, "It's foreseeable that if you're going to stab someone 10 or 15 times about the face and neck, it's going to result in a fatality."
During an open-air event, Rushdie told the court, he had been positioned on stage next to co-speaker Reese, who is instrumental in creating an organization that offers sanctuary to writers exiled and persecuted for their work. Rushdie is a writer, and in the years since he was made a target, many of his fellow writers have been hunted down and murdered.
Rushdie has long voiced worries about his personal safety since the publishing of his novel, The Satanic Verses, which is a surrealist and postmodern narrative inspired by the life of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Although the book won many Western literary prizes and is highly regarded in those circles, a conservative strain of Islam sees it as so egregious that it has been proscribed in a number of countries. In the most famous response, the supreme leader of Iran issued a death sentence for the author.
This fatwa forced Sir Salman to live nine years in hiding, during which he was subjected to an array of death threats. His public comeback, as well as his ability to travel, occurred only after Iran had sent signals saying it would not enforce the fatwa.
Hadi Matar is a 27-year-old man who may be sentenced to more than 30 years in prison. Matar lives in Fairview, New Jersey; his parents are Lebanese immigrants. Matar has been indicted federally in an unrelated case for allegedly giving material support to the militant group Hezbollah. That information came to light when an indictment was unsealed in July. Matar is also going to trial in U.S. District Court in Buffalo over a separate federal indictment; that document charges him with trying to give material support to Hezbollah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie
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