The Biden administration is apparently leaning toward abandoning the death penalty as punishment for the 9/11 plotters responsible for killing nearly 3,000 Americans. The military-commission prosecution has been stalled for a decade, and new delays mean that a trial cannot even be scheduled in the near term.
The New York Times reports that the acting chief prosecutor of the military-commission cases against jihadists detained at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has authorized case prosecutors to begin plea negotiations. The question is whether the government and the five terrorists charged in the case would agree to a resolution in which (a) prosecutors would not seek capital punishment and (b) the defendants would accept a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
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