I'm going to preface this column with the promise that if you read all the way through, eventually I'm going to talk about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

With that said, let's talk about penalizing people with death, i.e. --the death penalty. Yes, the death penalty, that most uplifting of topics. Sure, we've all got a death-penalty story or two to tell. Currently, however, I am interested in one particular death row yarn. I'm interested in the story of Zacarias Moussaoui.

Good old Zacarias. Good old terror-suspect Zacarias. He's known around these parts as the "20th hijacker."It's sort of like being known as the 5th Beatle, except much much more evil.

Now, if you haven't heard of Zacky, let me 'splain... No, there is too much. Let me sum up:

Moussaoui, a 33-year-old French-Moroccan, was arrested on Aug. 16 after workers at his flight-school decided he was a shady dude (he was the one that told his instructors that he merely wished to know how to steer the plane, not how to take-off or land).

As authorities began to piece together the lives of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, it became apparent that Moussaoui, still in jail on immigration charges, exhibited similar behavior to the known hijackers -- buying knives in a similar timeframe, getting 767 flight training videos in a similar timeframe, enrolling in flight school in a similar timeframe and joining a gym in a similar timeframe. It quickly became apparent that Moussaoui had been up to no good. The Attorney General pulled together a case against Moussaoui, alleging that he was to be the 20th Sept. 11 hijacker, and changed him with conspiracy to commit murder.

Alright, so the dossier on Zac seems pretty straight forward so far, n'es pas? His life story is brimming with links to the al-Qaida network. He spent time at a training camp in Afghanistan, the same one frequented by shoe bomber Richard Reid. He met with al-Qaida contacts that possibly provided him with funds.

So the case should be pretty cut and dry, right? Throw him in jail and lock the key, oui? Mais non! Last week, Attorney General Ashcroft announced that his office would be seeking the death penalty in their prosecution of Moussaoui. Ashcroft, a super-fan of the death penalty, stated that such punitive measures were appropriate, as Moussaoui conspired in "an especially heinous, cruel and depraved manner."

Ashcroft's push for the death penalty is troublesome at best. The first problems arise with the fact that not a single person in the history of our country has been sentenced to the death penalty as a result of conspiracy charges. The death penalty is usually reserved to the crimes that require a high burden of proof, such as first-degree murder. Conspiracy to commit a crime does not have such a high burden of proof... all one has to prove is that a person has agreed with another person to commit a crime. Since all that we have against Moussaoui is circumstantial evidence, with no direct links to the Sept. 11 terrorists, we can't charge him with anything more than conspiracy.

With such a low-burden of proof, there has to be a very electric-chair-happy jury to sentence Zac with death.

Our problems have a very French dimension as well (as you may have picked up through my clever foreshadowing). As previously noted, there is a ton of circumstantial evidence linking Moussaoui to al-Qaida. And while we do not have much hard evidence, the French government has been compiling information of Moussaoui for years, and has been planning on sharing their information with us.

That is, they were planning on sharing out information with us before Ashcroft decided to seek the death penalty. Now France, which outlawed the death penalty in 1981, has said that it will not cooperate. And without the voluminous hard evidence France has against Moussaoui, a case can only be built using circumstantial evidence we have already garnered.

So basically we're stuck with a suspect who we want to sentence to death because of the huge amounts of hard evidence against him, but we do not have access to the huge amounts of hard evidence against him because we want to sentence him to death. A most amusing paradox.

But on the broadest scale, the problem in seeking the death penalty with Moussaoui lies not with the French government or with the challenges of reaching the sentence of death through conspiracy charges. The broadest problem lies in our emphasis on Moussaoui in the first place.

Like it or not, Moussaoui is a footsoldier. (Enter the Ninja Turtle references). Moussaoui is not Shredder, Moussaoui is not Krang. Hell, Moussaoui is not even Bebop or Rocksteady. Moussaoui is one of the little purple guys that the Turtles fought by the dozen. And did the Turtles ever focus on one soldier? No, of course not. Such a strategy would have bogged the Turtles down and would have cost them the fight.

We have too much to lose by trying to sentence every footsoldier who comes along to death. We hobble our prosecutorial efforts and alienate ourselves from our allies.

Moussaoui is ultimately too small, too irrelevant in the scope of the war on terror to be worth the damage that would come of him being sentenced to death.

We should not let a footsoldier misdirect our efforts to end terrorism.