An Islamic extremist who killed eight individuals with a speeding truck in a 2017 rampage on a well-liked Recent York City bike path was convicted Thursday of 28 federal crimes and will face the death penalty.
Sayfullo Saipov bowed his head as he heard the decision within the trial for a Halloween attack that prosecutors said was inspired by his reverence for the Islamic State militant group. Saipov was tried in a Manhattan courtroom just a couple of blocks from where the attack ended.
A dozen jurors deliberated for about seven hours over two days before convicting Sapoiv, 34, of crimes including murder in aid of racketeering and supporting a foreign terrorist organization. The jury will return to court inside days to listen to more evidence to assist them resolve whether he ought to be executed or spend the remainder of his life in prison.
A death sentence for Saipov, a citizen of Uzbekistan, could be an extreme rarity in Recent York. The state not has capital punishment and the last state execution was in 1963. A federal jury in Recent York has not rendered a death sentence that withstood legal appeals in a long time, with the last execution in 1954.
Even before the trial, there was little doubt Saipov was a killer.
His lawyers conceded to the jury that he rented a pickup truck near his Recent Jersey home, steered it onto the trail along the Hudson River and mowed down bicyclists for blocks before crashing into a faculty bus near the World Trade Center.
He emerged from his truck yelling “God is great,” in Arabic, with pellet and paintball guns in his hands before he was shot by a police officer who thought the guns were real firearms.
The vehicle attack killed a lady visiting from Belgium together with her family, five friends from Argentina and two Americans. It left others with everlasting injuries, including a lady who lost her legs.
“His actions were senseless, horrific, and there is no justification for them,” defense attorney David Patton told the jury in the course of the trial.
The defense asked jurors to acquit Saipov of racketeering charges, saying he intended to die a martyr and was not conspiring with the Islamic State organization, despite voluminous amounts of propaganda from the group found on his electronic devices and at his home.
Saipov, who moved legally to the U.S. from Uzbekistan in 2010 and lived in Ohio and Florida before joining his family in Paterson, Recent Jersey, didn’t testify at his trial.
He sat quietly every day, unlike at a pretrial hearing in 2019 when he insisted on questioning the judge about why he ought to be judged for eight deaths when “hundreds and hundreds of Muslims are dying all around the world.”
Prosecutors said Saipov attacked civilians to impress the Islamic State group so he could change into a member and appeared pleased along with his work, smiling when he spoke to an FBI agent afterward.
Amongst those testifying were several members of the family from Belgium who were injured within the attack. Aristide Melissas, a father, said he had challenged members of the family to race their bikes to the World Trade Center with the loser paying for ice cream. Struck by Saipov’s truck, his skull was fractured and he underwent brain surgery.
His wife, Marion Van Reeth, spoke of waking up in a hospital to learn her legs had been amputated.
Saipov’s lawyers have said the death penalty process was irrevocably tainted by former President Donald Trump, who tweeted a day after the attack that Saipov “SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY!”
President Joe Biden instituted a moratorium on executions for federal crimes after taking office.
Until Saipov’s trial, Biden’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, had not launched any latest try to obtain the death penalty in a federal case. But Garland has allowed U.S. prosecutors to proceed advocating for capital punishment in cases inherited from previous administrations.
It has been a decade since a jury in Recent York last considered the death penalty
Federal juries in Brooklyn twice handed up a death sentence to a person who murdered two Recent York police detectives, once in 2007 and again in 2013, but each sentences were tossed out on appeal. A judge ultimately ruled the killer was intellectually disabled.
In 2001, just weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal jurors in Manhattan declined to impose a death sentence on two men convicted within the deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa after their lawyers urged them to not make the defendants into martyrs.