The murder trial on behalf of the Islamic State group of an Uzbek who killed eight cyclists and pedestrians in a large vehicle in New York in 2017, opened Monday, January 9, a file in which the American justice demanded the death penalty.
On Halloween in 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, a radicalized Uzbek, launched his pickup truck on a drive along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan, killing scores of people and killing eight, including five Argentines and a Belgian.
It was the deadliest toll for an attack in New York after those of September 11, 2001. The trial, which is expected to last three months in a Manhattan court, is the first at the federal level in Joe Biden's mandate where the sentence of death is at stake.
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The death penalty in question
Elected in November 2020, the Democratic president had promised during his campaign to work to abolish the death penalty at the federal level and his Minister of Justice had decreed a moratorium on federal executions shortly after the election, not preventing those decided by the states.
But in a Sept. 16, 2022 court document in Sayfullo Saipov's case file, Manhattan District Attorney Damian Williams acknowledged the Justice Department's decision "
to continue to seek the death penalty
" in the case and not reconsider a position decided under the mandate of Donald Trump (2017-2021).
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In another terrorist case, that of the Boston Marathon attack in 2013, the Biden administration had already refrained from blocking a referral to the Supreme Court under Donald Trump's mandate to restore the death penalty.
For one of the two authors, Djokhar Tsarnaev, the Supreme Court had restored the death penalty in March 2022.
