Sami Al-Arian, a tenured computer-science professor at the University of South Florida and a prominent Muslim civil-rights advocate, was indicted in 2003 on 53 counts of supporting Palestinian Islamic Jihad — the PATRIOT Act era's flagship material-support prosecution, built on half a million intercepted conversations from years of FISA surveillance. After a six-month 2005 trial, the jury acquitted him on the major counts and hung on the rest, convicting him of nothing.

The government refused the verdict's meaning: Al-Arian pleaded to a single count to end the case, expecting release, but was held in contempt for years more when he refused grand-jury testimony he believed was a perjury trap, spending five and a half years in prison and house arrest before his 2015 deportation to Turkey. His case remains the era's measure of how far a Palestine prosecution could run past a jury's refusal.