Jury Returns Verdict in Conviction of Terrorist in NYC Bike Lane Attack

NEW YORK – The New York federal jury charged with determining whether Sayfullo Saipov, the convicted murderer of a Manhattan bike lane massacre, is executed or spends the rest of his life in prison told a judge on Monday that he had already made a decision on his sentence, according to a spokesman for the prosecution.

It was unclear when the verdict would be read.

A vote in favor of death should be unanimous. The jury will begin deliberations on the death penalty on Thursday, less than a day after the hearings, due to the absence of a juror, whose absence was eventually excused because his brother was the victim of a heart attack.

The 34-year-old was convicted in January in a federal case of killing eight people on a Manhattan bike lane five years ago in an attempt to impress a terrorist group.

Saipov, an Uzbek national living in New Jersey at the time of the 2017 Halloween attack, drove a Home Depot rental van at least 10 blocks along the popular Hudson River Greenway bike path from West Houston Street to streets. pedestrians and cyclists before hitting a school bus.

The vehicle attack killed a woman visiting Belgium with her family, five Argentinian friends and two Americans. It left others with permanent injuries, including a woman who lost her legs.

The dozen jurors deliberated about seven hours over two days before finding Saipov guilty of 28 counts of crimes, including murder for the benefit of organized crime and support for a foreign terrorist organization. Later, a few days later, the jurors returned to court to hear more evidence to help them decide whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison.

A death sentence for Saipov would be an extreme rarity in New York. The state no longer carries out the death penalty and the last state execution was in 1963. A federal jury in New York did not hand down a death sentence that resisted legal appeals for decades, the latest execution that took place in 1954.

Witnesses at the time of the terror attack, the deadliest of its kind in New York since 9/11, said the school bus crash also appeared deliberate. A dozen of them were injured, some seriously, in addition to the eight who died in what authorities called a “cowardly act of terrorism”.

Saipov reportedly showed no remorse. Prosecutors told jurors in their closing arguments that later, the day after the attack, he said he was proud of what he had done and smiled when he spoke to an FBI agent.

He got out of his truck shouting “God is great” in Arabic, with pellet guns and paintballs in his hands before a policeman shot him because he thought it was real guns.

He also asked to hang the Islamic State group’s flag in his Manhattan hospital room, prosecutors previously said.

During the sentencing phase of the Saipov trial, emotions ran high. Saipov’s father professed shame and love for his son and the defendant’s uncle shouted “Dirty ISIS bastards!” and knocked on a door as he left the room.

Habibulloh Saipov’s testimony in Manhattan federal court and the ensuing outburst occurred before a jury that had to decide whether Sayfullo Saipov should be sentenced to death or life in prison.

“I’m sorry this happened,” Judge Vernon S. Broderick said after the jury left the courtroom. He said he was concerned about the effect the dramatic turn could have on jurors and warned defense lawyers to ensure such behavior does not happen again.

“To be disappointed is an understatement,” attorney David Patton told the judge. Broderick then kicked the uncle out of court.

The death penalty phase began after the same jury last month convicted Sayfullo Saipov, who slumped in his chair throughout the trial and appeared unabashed or emotional.

Cristina Navarrete updates us from Manhattan.

But she was comforted when her father, whom she recently saw for the first time in 13 years, spoke out against the terror attack, saying she had brought the family to shame.

Asked by defense attorney David Stern about his reaction to his son’s attack, Habibulloh Saipov said: “My soul has been destroyed.”

“He committed a terrible tragedy. He killed eight people and injured many others and ruined their lives,” Saipov said.

“What do you think of what he did?” Stern asked.

“I feel really bad about this. And I would like to apologize to everyone, to all the victims,” ​​he continued.

Habibulloh Saipov testified that he once told his son after working in the United States for five years that “people there are sincere and always smile at each other”.

When the son arrived in the country in 2010 and started working as a truck driver, the father said they often had hour-long conversations to keep him awake on long journeys.

Habibulloh Saipov cried as he said he found out his son had carried out the attack and saw his wife collapse and pass out after seeing the footage of the aftermath on her phone. He said he was then subjected to 15 days of interrogation by the police.

At one point, Sayfullo Saipov removed the protective mask from his face to wipe his eyes as his father cried. The father also spoke of phone calls in which Sayfullo Saipov boasted that he should feel lucky to have a son who had done something heroic.

“Do you feel lucky to have a son who did what he did? Stern asked.

“Absolutely not,” replied the father.

Habibulloh Saipov admitted he would probably never see his son again after returning to his home country of Uzbekistan.

Carolina Ardila reports from Lower Manhattan.

When asked if she still loved him, she replied, “With all my heart.”

He added that he hopes his son will not be sentenced to death so that he realizes the truth about his crimes.

The uncle’s outburst and another scream from an unidentified woman left a relative of one of the victims sobbing when the judge called a nurse. He also ordered the search of Sayfullo Saipov.

The words “Dirty ISIS bastards” were played through an interpreter at the judge’s request. The interpreter said that anything else anyone said was unintelligible.

Sayfullo Saipov told investigators after his arrest that he carried out the killings after the Islamic State group called for terrorist attacks.

Testimony resumed after a long pause and the judge told the jury that the uncle’s outburst was not directed against the court, the jury, the prosecutors, the defense or the trial.

Hamidulloh Saipov, another uncle, testified that he too still loves his nephew, even though he thinks he did “something wrong, something amazing”.

“He broke everyone’s heart. He broke our hearts,” the uncle said. “Everyone was shocked. Everyone was sick.”

He said Sayfullo Saipov changed because he was “influenced by bad people” and added that he hoped his nephew would “come back himself”.

Sayfullo Saipov’s sister, a year his junior, also tearfully described the damage her brother’s actions did to their parents’ health.

Until Saipov’s trial, Biden’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, had launched no new attempts to secure the death penalty in a federal case. But Garland has authorized U.S. prosecutors to continue to advocate capital punishment in cases handed down from previous administrations.

It has been ten years since a jury in New York considered the death penalty.

Federal juries in Brooklyn have twice sentenced to death a man who murdered two NYPD detectives, once in 2007 and again in 2013, but both sentences were overturned on appeal. A judge eventually ruled the killer had an intellectual disability.

In 2001, just weeks before the September 11 attacks, federal juries in Manhattan refused to impose the death penalty on two men convicted of the deadly attacks on two American embassies in Africa. The men’s lawyers had urged jurors not to make martyrs of the defendants.