Jury foreman explains Mustafa Ali sentence

To Mustafa Ali, convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for shooting and killing two armored-van guards as they worked on a Northeast Philadelphia ATM, the jury's sentence of life in prison instead of death by lethal injection was an act of mercy.

The grief-stricken families of slain Loomis guards William Widmaier and Joseph Alullo - former Philadelphia police officers who survived decades patrolling the city's streets only to be gunned down in their postretirement jobs - saw it as an infuriating, unbearable injustice.

But it was not, jury foreman Ross Chapman said yesterday, sympathy for Ali, his traumatic upbringing, or the two young sons he obviously loves and will never again see outside a prison visiting room.

"This was not sympathy. Not one of us felt bad for him," Chapman said of the decision reached Wednesday night by the seven women and four other men on the Common Pleas Court jury. "I will tell you that we shed a lot of tears in that [jury] room, but not one drop was shed for him."

He said the sentence was a product of the justice system and the deliberation process.

"I realize that people may misunderstand our decision," he said. "We did not forgive Mr. Ali. What he did was absolutely unforgivable, and we gave him the worst, most severe sentence we could give him based on the instructions given us from the judge."

Neither Assistant District Attorney Michael Barry nor Marc A. Bookman, leader of Ali's team of three public defenders, could be reached for comment.

Chapman, a professor of philosophy and logic at the Community College of Philadelphia, spoke out of what he said was a desire to help people understand how the system works.

According to trial testimony, shortly after 8 a.m. Oct. 4, 2007, a Loomis armored van left its home base in Pennsauken and crossed into Northeast Philadelphia to begin servicing ATMs.

The van headed toward a first stop at a credit union, and it was spotted by Ali, 39, then purportedly on his way to work in Trenton. Ali, driving a new Acura TL luxury car, followed the van to an ATM outside the Wachovia Bank at Bustleton and Bleigh Avenues at the Roosevelt Mall.

He parked about 300 feet away, put on gloves, pulled out a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, and walked toward the ATM.

The ATM security camera video shows Widmaier working on the machine and Alullo standing next to him. Ali walks up, shoots the two guards, walks back, retrieves the guards' bank bag, and walks away.

Widmaier, 65, of Fairless Hills, and Alullo, 54, died at the scene. The van driver, Joseph Walczak, 72, of Frankford, was injured by flying glass when a shot shattered the van's bulletproof window.

Ali was arrested within a day.

The jury, which began hearing evidence Feb. 1, came back with two first-degree murder verdicts Feb. 17 but acquitted Ali of attempted murder in the shot that shattered the window.

Last Friday the jury began hearing evidence before deciding whether Ali should be executed or spend life in prison without a chance of parole.

The prosecutor argued strongly for death. He said four legal factors justified execution: the double murders, their commission during a robbery, Ali's endangering of civilians during the shoot-out outside a busy Northeast intersection, and his conviction in federal court of five bank robberies in 1992.

Ali's public defenders presented an equally compelling case: testimony about Ali's abandonment by mother and father by age 2 and his early childhood deprivation, and a poignant video of Ali talking with sons Naqi, 9, and Taqi, 6, by telephone from the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.

The video especially moved many in the crowded courtroom to tears.

But, according to Chapman, it did not persuade jurors to vote for life in prison over death.

The key to the sentence, he said, was in the verdict rendered a week earlier. By deciding that Alullo, not Ali, fired the bullet that hit the van, Chapman said, the jury could not find that Ali planned to kill the guards before robbing them.

The alternative? Ali, seeing Alullo go for his gun, started firing as his way of escaping a situation flying out of control.

"His options were to flee or surrender, and he decided to deal with the situation by killing them," Chapman said.

"If we had evidence that Mr. Ali planned to murder those guards, I don't think anybody on that jury would have hesitated to sentence him to death," Chapman said.