Le procès pour meurtres au nom du groupe Etat islamique d’un Ouzbek qui avait tué huit cyclistes et piétons à bord d’un gros véhicule à New York en 2017, s’est ouvert lundi, un dossier dans lequel la justice américaine a sued la death penalty.
On Halloween 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, a radicalized Uzbek, dumped his truck along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan, killing dozens of people and killing eight, including five Argentines and one Belgian. It was the deadliest death toll from an attack in New York after those of September 11, 2001.
The trial, which is expected to last three months in a Manhattan courthouse, is the first at the federal level in Joe Biden’s tenure where the death penalty is at stake.
The defendant faces the death penalty
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 justice minister had decreed a moratorium on federal executions shortly after the election, without preventing those decided by the states .
But in a September 16, 2022 court document in the Sayfullo Saipov 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 to reconsider a position decided under the mandate of Donald Trump. (2017-2021).
In another terrorist case, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the Biden administration had already refrained from blocking a Supreme Court referral under Donald Trump’s mandate to reinstate the death penalty. For one of the two authors, Djokhar Tsarnaev, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in March 2022.
Source: BFM TV
