“We don’t want to waste our time with motions,” Mohammed, captured in Pakistan in 2003, told a judge today. “All of you are paid by the U.S. government. I’m not trusting any American.”

The NY Times says the pleas didn’t come as a complete surprise. “There had been indications for months that the detainees were resisting working with the military lawyers assigned to represent them.” But the confessions by the five, who face the death penalty, were also seen as a way they could air their political views without the government having the opportunity to detail their roles in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. Reports the Times:

The American political calendar may also be a factor. Many people inside and outside the government expect President-elect Obama to close down the military commissions that have been used by the Bush administration, and to direct that many detainees now held in Guantánamo Bay be prosecuted instead in the civilian American legal system.

If that happens, today’s proceedings will have been the defendants’ last opportunity to challenge a seriously flawed military justice system – as opposed to the less-flawed federal system - and publicly seek martyrdom. 

Katherine Riofta wonders when her brother is getting out of prison. Will it be days, weeks, or years? She’s sure he didn’t shoot anyone. So is a lawyer who wrote the attorney general’s office telling them the state has the wrong guy. “Alex was misidentified and wrongly convicted,” says Katherine, “and they know it.”

Alexander Riofta, 26, was convicted in a 2000 first-degree assault case linked to the 1998 gang-related massacre at a Vietnamese karaoke bar in Tacoma, the Trang Dai, which left five dead and six wounded. Riofta, then a teenager, was friends with some of the accused Trang Dai killers, and was found in 2001 to have shot at, and missed, the brother of a witness who’d agreed to testify. He has so far done seven years based on the eyewitness testimony of the victim. No fingerprints were found in a stolen car used by the gunman or on a spent bullet. A white hat that flew off the head of the gunman was never tested for DNA.

In 2002, Kristi Minchau, a Tacoma attorney who represented Jimmee Chea, a gang member convicted in the Trang Dai killings, contacted the AG’s office during Riofta’s appeal. Chea had told her “who actually committed the shooting for which Alexander Riofta has been convicted and why the victim lied about the shooter’s identity.” Chea didn’t give her permission to reveal the name, she said, but she was allowed to say “it is someone who has a prior conviction in Washington for a violent offense and whose DNA should be on record…” It should match the DNA in the hat.

Said Minchau: “I have absolutely no reason to doubt what Jimmee told me. I also have absolutely no stake in the Riofta case. But if this guy has been wrongly convicted, he deserves a chance at proving it…” Pierce County prosecutors and the AG’s office both oppose DNA testing of the hat, however, which could show it was worn by someone other than Riofta or that, lacking Riofta’s DNA, show he wasn’t at the scene. Citing case law, the prosecutor and AG say Riofta’s trial attorney had the chance to test the DNA early on, but didn’t, and there’s no “probability of innocence” to do it now.

The case landed before the state Supreme Court last year, along with other DNA appeals sought by the University of Washington’s Northwest Innocence Project. In oral arguments last October, Minchau’s letter got short shrift. Michelle Luna-Green, representing the state, suggested Riofta was merely fishing for evidence under a law intended for those “very real” situations when a person could be innocent. It is now 11 months later, with no indication a decision is coming down soon. That’s an unbearably long time to decide the obvious, that the denial of DNA testing is both legally and morally indefensible, says Katherine Riofta.

“Evidence shows the eyewitness could not have seen anyone that night,” she says. “But the DNA test can settle that.” Being sure you’ve locked up the right person doesn’t seem too much to ask.