Biography
Lyglenson Lemorin was a Haitian-born member of the Seas of David and a legal U.S. resident at the time of the June 23, 2006 arrests. He was held in federal pretrial detention through the first Liberty City trial in fall 2007. The first jury hung as to the other six defendants but unanimously acquitted Lemorin on all charges in December 2007. Despite his acquittal in federal criminal court, the Department of Homeland Security immediately initiated immigration removal proceedings against him as a 'terrorism-related' deportee, and he was deported to Haiti in 2010 — making him one of the most cited cases of a federal terrorism acquittal followed by an immigration-court deportation on the same alleged conduct.
On June 23, 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested seven men in the predominantly Haitian-American Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, Florida. They were members of a small religious collective called the Seas of David — founded by Narseal Batiste, the group blended elements of Christianity, the Moorish Science Temple, and Black Hebrew Israelite practice, and met in a warehouse in Liberty City where its members worked construction jobs and studied scripture. Federal prosecutors charged all seven with conspiring with al-Qaeda to blow up the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago, the FBI's Miami office, and other federal buildings.
The plot was, from the federal government's first contact with the group, manufactured by FBI confidential informants. After receiving an October 2005 tip, the Miami FBI inserted a paid informant (Abbas al-Saidi) into the group's circle, and later a second informant (Elie Assad) posing as an al-Qaeda recruiter. The informants supplied the group with cash, with combat boots, and with the suggestion that they "swear bayat" (an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden) — a ceremony staged at the informants' insistence. The defendants never had any actual contact with al-Qaeda, never possessed any weapons or explosives, never traveled to any of the buildings prosecutors said they planned to attack, and never made any concrete steps toward an actual operation. Their case became, alongside the Newburgh Four, one of the two most cited examples of post-9/11 FBI manufactured-plot terrorism prosecutions.
The case went through three federal trials before Judge Joan A. Lenard at the U.S. District Court in Miami. The first trial (October–December 2007) ended in a hung jury and acquittal for Lyglenson Lemorin. The second trial (January–April 2008) also ended in a hung jury for the remaining six defendants. The third trial (January–May 2009) finally produced convictions of Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Burson Augustin, and Rothschild Augustine, and an acquittal for Naudimar Herrera. The five convicted defendants were sentenced together on November 20, 2009. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed the convictions in 2013 over a vigorous dissent that compared the case to the wave of "outrageous government conduct" cases that had once been recognized in U.S. law.
