More than 20 defendants stand accused of an alleged conspiracy to kill Americans that has been underway for more than a decade. Two years of investigation has gone into the embassy attacks, several more years into the activities of Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the reputed terrorist network leader and bombings mastermind. With copies for each defense lawyer and each defendant in custody, the government has produced several million pages of photocopies. When I first got on the case, I was greeted by 81 boxes of documents and videotapes. The documents don't arrive in any particular order, are not sorted by defendant, and are not necessarily indexed.
Defense attorneys have to sift the material to find what is applicable to their clients.
Sometimes you get overloaded. It's very difficult to pinpoint the useful documents from the useless documents, and we may not be able to do it until testimony has been taken. The amount of evidence results from government's choice to prosecute two terrorist bombings under the umbrella of a larger worldwide conspiracy. In addition to the twin explosions in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the government implicates bin Laden and his associates in the killing of U.S. servicemen in Somalia in 1993, and other violent acts in between. Prosecutors considered separate trials for individual defendants but told the court that process would take more time than a combined defendant trial.