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9/11 trial deliberations, day 5From Phil Hirschkorn and Carol Cratty  Zacarias Moussaoui is the only person to be tried in the U.S. in connection with the 9/11 attacks. RELATED
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSALEXANDRIA, Virginia (CNN) -- Jurors deciding whether Zacarias Moussaoui should be executed began their fifth day of deliberations Monday. The panel of nine men and three women is not being sequestered and has deliberated for more than 21 hours since receiving the case April 24. The panel is deciding whether Moussaoui should be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole or death by lethal injection for his connection to the September 11, 2001, terrorism conspiracy. Moussaoui, 37, an admitted al Qaeda operative from France, claimed in his trial testimony he was training to pilot a fifth hijacked passenger jet into the White House on September 11 and that he knew the World Trade Center was being targeted. The jury last had deliberations on Friday after taking the day off Thursday because a juror was ill. On Friday morning, Judge Leonie Brinkema called the jury into court because she had been informed one of them had looked up a word in a dictionary. She questioned the offending juror in private before speaking to the whole jury. "If any juror has a question that you among yourselves cannot adequately answer, we're here to help you as much as we can," the judge said. The word the inquisitive juror wanted defined was "aggravating," as in the "aggravating factors" prosecutors propose should steer the jury toward a verdict of death. "The word 'aggravating' essentially means to make something worse," the judge told the jurors before sending them back. She admonished them again not to do any independent research. Both sides agreed the dictionary-consulting juror could remain on the panel. The defendant, always ready with the last word, said after the jury left, "Moussaoui, aggravating curse on America." The jurors have surpassed the 17 hours they spent deciding that Moussaoui was eligible for the death penalty. In the first phase, their verdict form had four questions to answer, while the current verdict form requires them to address 33 aggravating and mitigating factors before answering the final question of Moussaoui's punishment. In the trial's first phase, the jury found Moussaoui's lies to federal agents who arrested him in August 2001 covered up the hijacking conspiracy and helped 19 terrorists to carry out their mission to crash planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while a fourth plane aimed at Washington crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Had Moussaoui told the truth to interrogators, prosecutors argued, FBI detective work could have identified more than half of the 19 hijackers then living under their true names in the United States, and aviation security officials could have imposed measures that might have stopped some hijackers from boarding planes. The first verdict found at least one of the 2,973 deaths on September 11 occurred as a "direct result" of Moussaoui's lies. Moussaoui told jurors in testimony during the second phase that he felt "no regret, no remorse" for the deaths and mocked victims' family members who testified about the impact of their losses. Defense attorneys argue Moussaoui should not be executed because he was a minor player in the conspiracy who was behind bars on September 11, and that killing him would make him a martyr for al Qaeda. 
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