Lawyers for an Israeli Jewish man convicted of murdering three members of a Palestinian Arab family vowed Monday morning that they will appeal the decision to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Earlier on Monday, 25-year-old Amiram Ben-Uliel, a resident of a small town in the Shilo bloc of Samaria, was found guilty by the Lod District Court on three counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder in connection with an arson which destroyed a Palestinian Arab family’s home in 2015.
He was also found guilty of conspiracy to commit a hate crime, but was found not guilty of membership in a terrorist organization.
Ben-Uliel’s legal defense team excoriated the Lod District Court over its decision, calling it a “black day” for Israel.
"This is a black day for the state of Israel,” the defense team said in a statement.
"A day on which an Israeli court set its hand to convicting a man whose innocence cries out to the heavens."
Attorney Yitzhak Ram, who helped defend Ben-Uliel, blasted the court for allowing some of the confessions made by his client to be accepted into evidence, despite acknowledging that interrogators had extracted the confessions under duress.
“After the court accepted the confession and recreation [of the crime] which had been extracted under torture, getting to a conviction was just a matter of judicial acrobatics bridging the confessions with the contradictory evidence which was found in the field.”
Ram said the defense team would appeal the verdict, and would ask that the Supreme Court disqualify all of the confessions made by Ben-Uliel under duress.
“After the court managed this acrobatic feat, the path has now been opened up to us to appeal to the Supreme Court regarding the permissibility of the confession given under torture.”
Protesters who had gathered outside of the court Monday condemned the verdict, accusing prosecutors of leading a witch-hunt.
Ben-Uliel was accused of prosecutors of hurling two firebombs into the Dawabshe family home in the town of Duma on the night of July 31st, 2015, in retaliation for a terrorist attack south of Duma which left one Israeli man dead.
Three members of the Dawabshe family were killed in the blaze which broke out on July 31st, while a fourth member, four-year-old Ahmed, was severely injured.