(Sacramento Bee) Four days after a federal judge vacated the conviction and sentence of Lodi terror suspect Hamid Hayat, his attorneys filed a motion Friday seeking Hayat’s immediate release from an Arizona prison and asking that he be allowed to return home.
“Defendant Hayat has been in custody in this matter since June 2005 — i.e., a period of more than 14 years — for convictions that this court has now vacated,” San Francisco attorney Dennis Riordan wrote in a motion filed in federal court in Sacramento. “The court’s July 30 order essentially found that Hayat’s trial counsel failed to investigate and present critical evidence of her client’s innocence to the jury at defendant’s trial in 2006, and that such failure fundamentally under mines confidence in the resulting verdict.”
