A man who killed eight people when he intentionally drove a Home Depot pickup truck down a Manhattan bike lane in 2017 could become the first person to be executed in New York state in six decades.
This week, prosecutors will ask a jury in the Southern District of New York to sentence Sayfullo Saipov, 35, to the death penalty for the assault after he was found guilty of a federal crime in January.
Saipov drove the truck across the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey on Halloween Day 2017 before turning onto a bike lane on the West Side and hitting nearly a dozen pedestrians and cyclists.
After getting on a school bus, he jumped out of the truck and threatened people with fake guns.
New York State has not used the death penalty since 2004, but it can still be used for the federal crimes of which Saipov was convicted. If the jury decides not to sentence him to death, he will receive life imprisonment without parole.
The execution of Sayfullo Saipov, 35, an Uzbek citizen, would be extremely rare in New York. The state no longer has the death penalty and the last state execution was in 1963
Saipov intentionally drove a rental Home Depot pickup truck down a Manhattan bike lane in 2017. Prosecutors will ask a jury this week to hand him the death penalty
On Thursday, Saipov’s lawyers sought to overturn the government’s decision to seek the death penalty because the Biden administration imposed a federal moratorium on executions.
Specifically, they cited the government’s decision not to seek the death penalty for Patrick Crusius, who was involved in a 2019 shooting in El Paso, Texas that killed 23 people. The defense therefore argued that Saipov was being discriminated against because of his ethnicity.
“Given the recent decision to accept Patrick Crusius’ guilty plea to life imprisonment for his unrepentant and premeditated hate killing of 23 Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas – Crusius is a white US-born citizen – the court should have serious concerns A driving force behind the obituary in this case is Mr Saipov’s religion and national origin, which violates the Fifth and Eighth Amendments,” defense attorney David Patton said.
‘[After the attack] Then-President Trump persistently demanded that Mr. Saipov face the death penalty based on nothing more than an inappropriate assessment of his crime and his identity as an Uzbek Muslim immigrant who was a winner of the diversity visa lottery – an aspect of United States immigration policy , who has long been the focus of the Trump administration’s ire,” the defense added.
His lawyers had previously said the death penalty process was spoiled by Trump, who tweeted a day after the attack that Saipov “SHOULD HAVE THE DEATH PENALTY!”.
Saipov bowed his head last month as he heard the verdict in a Manhattan courtroom just blocks from the end of the attack.
Prosecutors said the killing spree was inspired by his reverence for ISIS.
The dozen jurors deliberated for about seven hours over two days before convicting him of 28 crimes, including murder for the benefit of extortion and aiding a foreign terrorist organization.
Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, 35, repeatedly expressed his support for ISIS after the 2017 attack in which he allegedly plowed through a crowd on a bike lane in New York
The jury is now scheduled to hear more evidence to decide whether to execute him or spend the rest of his life in prison. A federal jury in New York has not returned a death sentence that has stood up to judicial appeal since 1954.
His attorneys admitted to the jury that he rented a pickup truck near his home in New Jersey, drove it along the Hudson River path and mowed down cyclists in blocks before crashing into a school bus near the World Trade Center may be.
He got out of his truck shouting “God is great” in Arabic, holding bullet and paintball guns, before being shot dead by a police officer who thought they were real guns.
The vehicle attack killed a woman visiting with her family from Belgium, five friends from Argentina and two Americans. Others sustained permanent injuries, including a woman who lost her legs.
Sayfullo Saipov bowed his head as he heard the verdict in a Manhattan courtroom just blocks from the end of the attack
A New York police officer stands next to a body covered under a white sheet near a mangled bicycle on a bike path
“His actions were senseless, appalling and there is no justification for it,” Patton told the jury at the trial.
The defense asked the jury to acquit Saipov on racketeering charges as he planned to die a martyr and did not conspire with the Islamic State organization, despite extensive amounts of the group’s propaganda found on his electronic devices and in his home .
Saipov did not testify at his trial. Instead, he sat quietly every day, unlike at a court hearing in 2019, where he insisted on questioning the judge why he should be convicted of eight deaths when “thousands upon thousands of Muslims around the world die”.
Saipov legally moved to the United States from Uzbekistan in 2010 and lived in Ohio and Florida before joining his family in Paterson, New Jersey.
A paramedic looks at a body covered with a white sheet on a bike path after the shooting
Five members of this group of Argentine friends were also killed. They are Hernán Diego Mendoza (far left), Alejandro Damián Pagnucco (second from left), Ariel Erlij (third from left), Diego Enrique Angelini (second from right) and Hernán Ferruchi (third from right)
New Jersey resident Darren Drake, 32, and Belgian tourist Ann-Laure Decadt, 31, were killed
Nicholas Cleves, 23, was the only New Yorker killed. His mother was unable to attend the memorial service because she was only informed of the service by the mayor’s office at 4 p.m. on Tuesday
A group, with some in prayer, stops at a makeshift memorial on a bike path in New York City
Prosecutors said Saipov attacked civilians to impress the Islamic State group so he could become a member and appeared content with his work, smiling when he spoke to an FBI agent afterwards.
Among the witnesses were several family members from Belgium who were injured in the attack. Aristide Melissas, a father, said he challenged family members to ride their bikes to the World Trade Center, with the loser paying for ice cream. When he was hit by Saipov’s truck, his skull was fractured. He had brain surgery.
His wife, Marion Van Reeth, spoke of waking up in a hospital to find her legs had been amputated.
Until the trial of Saipov, Biden’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, had made no new attempt to obtain the death penalty in a federal proceeding. But Garland has allowed US prosecutors to continue to champion the death penalty in cases inherited from previous administrations.
It has been a decade since a jury in New York considered the death penalty.
Federal juries in Brooklyn twice sentenced a man to death for the murder of two New York City police officers, once in 2007 and again in 2013, but both sentences were overturned on appeal. A judge eventually ruled that the killer was mentally challenged.
In 2001, just weeks before the September 11 attacks, a federal jury in Manhattan denied the death sentences of two men convicted of the deadly bombings of two US embassies in Africa. The men’s lawyers had urged the jury not to make martyrs of the accused.