The US judiciary on Monday called for the death penalty against Uzbek Sayfullo Saipov, who killed eight people on behalf of the Islamic State group in New York in 2017, a first for a federal trial under the mandate of Joe Biden, who had nonetheless defended its abolition more nationally Level.
Before a jury in Manhattan federal court, US Attorney Amanda Houle claimed she “please (wait) for a death sentence to be imposed, not because it would be easy, but because it is the appropriate sentence in this case.”
“The fair sentence,” she pounded.
“Sayfullo Saipov carried out a horrific terrorist attack in this city on behalf of IS; He killed eight people, he tried to kill many others, he’s proud of what he did,” thundered the US Attorney’s Office representative.
“Terrorist”
The 35-year-old Uzbek had already been found guilty by a jury of the same federal court on January 26 of aggravated murder and “support of a terrorist organization”.
It is therefore a second trial with the same 12 jurors who must unanimously decide the fate of Mr. Saipov, who is present in the courtroom, seated between his lawyers, dark jacket on white shirt, long black beard and black hair. Families of victims or survivors of the October 31, 2017 attack also sat on the benches on Monday.
On Halloween 2017, Sayfullo Saipov drove a pickup truck into passers-by on a bike path along the Hudson River in Manhattan. A deadly ride that killed eight people, including five Argentines and one Belgian, and injured many.
Prosecutor Houle recalled that Mr Saipov, who swore allegiance to ISIS, never expressed remorse, that “he has not given up jihad (…) remains committed to ISIS” and “always represents a danger”, even in prison.
“death spiral”
For its part, the defense urged the jury to “stop the death spiral.”
In the fall of 2017, then-Republican President Donald Trump (2017-2021) immediately called for the death penalty, a position championed by his Justice Department and the current Democratic administration of Joe Biden. In the eyes of human rights organizations, this is contradicted by candidate Biden’s pledge to abolish the death penalty at federal level by 2020.
However, a federal moratorium on executions was imposed by Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland in July 2021.
These have been very rare anyway, with executions – six in 2023 – being carried out most often by states that have not yet abolished the death penalty. Donald Trump had made an exception to this rule by ordering 13 executions at the end of his mandate, a record.
Death penalty activists are blaming Joe Biden for failing to commute the sentences of 44 convicts on federal death row to life imprisonment and citing the risk of them being executed under another president’s warrant .
A lawyer for Mr Saipov, David Patton, said in late January his client was “the only federal defendant in the country against whom the Justice Department sought the death penalty at trial,” as opposed to cases where the killer claimed more lives, such as one anti-Hispanic rampage in El Paso in 2017 (23 dead).
An “arbitrary” and “unconstitutional” decision based on the “religion and (the) national origin” of this Uzbek who came to the United States in 2010, according to this attorney.
Observers see this as an exception related to the terrorist classification of the case withheld by the courts, as in the case of the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing Court to block restoring the death penalty against one of the perpetrators, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
If sentenced to death, Sayfullo Saipov could appeal and not be executed under Minister Garland’s moratorium anyway.
The last federal execution ordered by the Manhattan court was in 1954.