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U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked a pre-trial agreement reached with the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and two other defendants, putting the death penalty back on the table.
The plea deal, signed on Wednesday, had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices reportedly exchange guilty pleas for life sentences in prison. The series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.
In a memo issued on Friday, Austin argued that “in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused … responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority.” Austin withdrew the authority of the officer overseeing the military court who signed off on the deal on Wednesday, Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier.
The decision brought relief to family members of victims who had called out the plea agreement as too lenient.
Terry Strada, who leads the 9/11 Families United group and lost her husband in the attacks, told the BBC on Saturday she was “very pleased” by the Pentagon’s action and to have capital punishment put back on the table, “not because I am ghoulish or a horrible person; it’s because it fits the crime.”
Mohammed’s lead lawyer, Gary D. Sowards, criticized Austin’s move. “I am respectfully and profoundly disappointed that after all of these years the government still has not learned the lessons of this case, and the mischief that results from disregarding due process and fair play,” he told the New York Times.
