[4] In June 2005, Hamid Hayat was arrested and charged with providing material support to terrorists, and of lying about it to FBI agents.
The prosecution alleged that Hamid Hayat had spent the better part of two years at an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, returning in 2005 with an intent to attack civilian targets in the United States.
Sentencing was set for July 14, 2006, before U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr.[5] His father, Umer Hayat, was also arrested and charged with two counts of making false statements to the FBI regarding the investigation of his son and of certain members of the Muslim community of Lodi.
[1] Hamid Hayat's attorney, Wazhma Mojaddidi, also claimed that he had been worn down by the FBI's five-hour interrogation and confessed to crimes that he did not commit.
"[1] FBI agents also recovered from his room jihadist magazines (e.g. of the Jaish-e-Mohammed) and a "jihad scrapbook" containing articles praising the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
"[5] Much was made of how Umer Hayat seemed to possess sums of cash unusual for an ice cream truck driver with only an 8th grade education (e.g. a $390,000 home with no outstanding debt).
According to U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr., Hayat "appears to have access to a significant amount of cash from an unexplained source.
On May 17, 2007, U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. rejected a new trial for Hamid Hayat, writing in his ruling that the reports of juror misconduct were not credible.
The dissenting Judge Tashima in Hayat's unsuccessful appeal argued that he would reverse the conviction "because the judicial branch's constitutional duty to do justice in criminal prosecutions was not fulfilled in this case in which the government asked a jury to deprive a man of his liberty largely based on dire, but vague, predictions that the defendant might commit unspecified crimes in the future" (United States v Hayat 2013: 4, 59, emphasis in original).
In 2019, Hamid Hayat's story was featured in Season 2 of Netflix's documentary series The Confession Tapes in an episode entitled "Marching Orders".
Two federal judges have concluded that Hamid would not have been found guilty had the powerful evidence of his innocence that won his freedom in 2019 been presented to his jury in 2006.
While we are grateful for the dismissal, the fourteen years Hamid spent behind bars on charges of which he was innocent remain a grave miscarriage of justice.