NEW YORK – A New York jury began deliberating on Wednesday whether to impose the death penalty or life in prison on a man convicted of killing eight people on a Manhattan bike path five years ago. years during a terrorist attack.
The same 12-person jury that convicted Sayfullo Saipov in late January in the 2017 Halloween rampage began pondering their fate after U.S. District Judge Vernon S. Broderick read them the legal rules they must follow to make a decision. After about two and a half hours of deliberation, the jurors were sent home and asked to return Thursday.
They had deliberated for just 10 minutes on Wednesday when the foreman of the jury sent a note to the judge asking if the panel can affirm that lethal injection is the current method of death penalty in the United States and that there is currently a moratorium on federal executions.
Broderick told jurors that none of the topics were suitable for discussion during deliberations and told them to disregard them either.
Jurors will have to unanimously agree that Saipov must be executed or the 35-year-old former Paterson, New Jersey resident will spend the rest of his life in a high-security prison.
Lawyers for Saipov, an Uzbek citizen, have never denied killing eight people by speeding a rental truck onto a lower Manhattan bike path popular with tourists. A woman visiting Belgium with her family, five Argentinian friends and two Americans were killed. Eighteen other people were seriously injured.
Saipov’s lawyers asked the jury not to carry out the death penalty, noting that several members of his family, including his father and sisters, had expressed hope that one day he would realize how wrong he was to carry out a terrorist attack in the hope of favoring the Islamic State group.
And they stressed he would spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement, likely confined to a small cell for at least 22 hours a day with two 15-minute phone calls allowed each month to his family and a few showers allowed each week.
Prosecutors have called for death, saying Saipov never showed compassion for any of his victims as he tried to kill as many people as he could, even confessing he hoped to get to the bridge of Brooklyn after the bike path storming so he could kill more people. there.
Afterwards, they said, he smiled proudly as he recounted his attack to FBI agents, even asking for the Islamic State organization’s flag to be hung in his hospital room, where he was recovering from an injury. shot after a police officer completed his attack.
A day after the attack, then-President Donald Trump tweeted that Saipov “SHOULD GET THE DEATH PENALTY!”
President Joe Biden later imposed a moratorium on executions for federal crimes, but his attorney general, Merrick Garland, allowed U.S. prosecutors to continue advocating capital punishment in cases inherited from previous administrations.
A federal jury in New York has not handed down a death sentence that has resisted legal challenge for decades, with the last execution in 1954. New York State, which no longer carries out the death penalty , has not executed anyone since 1963. .