Shortly after Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, was arrested on suspicion of using a truck to kill eight people on a Manhattan bike path in 2017, President Donald J. Trump declared on Twitter, “SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY.” Ultimately, Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, authorized federal prosecutors to seek capital punishment should Mr. Saipov be convicted.
But with Mr. Saipov’s trial looming this fall, his lawyers have asked Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, appointed by President Biden, to withdraw the death penalty authorization, which would mean life imprisonment for Mr. Saipov if he were found guilty.
Mr. Garland has not signaled how he might decide. But the request comes at a time when lawyers representing federal capital defendants appear to have reason for hope: Before he took office, Mr. Garland, without fanfare, publicly withdrew government death-penalty requests in cases involving 16 defendants from around the country, according to the Justice Department and federal court records.
And in his 14 months as attorney general, Mr. Garland has not authorized local U.S. attorneys to seek the death penalty in any new cases, the Justice Department said.
In July 2021, several months after Mr. Garland was sworn in, he announced a moratorium on federal executions pending a review of the department’s policies and procedures. That review is continuing, the department has said.
Mr. Garland noted at the time that in the previous two years, the Justice Department had changed its methods of carrying out executions, which are relatively infrequent in the federal system. There are currently just over 40 prisoners on federal death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. After a hiatus in federal executions that lasted nearly two decades, the Trump administration carried out 13 executions in its last six months, including three in the final days of his presidency.
Under Mr. Garland, the department has continued to defend the death penalty in some cases. For example, it fought the appeal of the death sentence that a jury had imposed on Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who in 2015 killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C. And it asked the Supreme Court last fall to reinstate the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three people and injured hundreds. In March, the court reinstated the sentence, which had been overturned on appeal.
Mr. Garland has not publicly detailed his reasons for de-authorizing the death penalty requests, decisions typically disclosed in brief court filings without elaboration. The New York Times initially reported in July that Mr. Garland had dropped the pursuit of capital punishment in cases involving seven defendants; The Houston Chronicle reported in December that the number had grown to 12.
With the total now at 16, court records show that in 14 instances, Mr. Garland reversed decisions made during the Trump administration. A 15th was made under former President Barack Obama.
The 16th case involved a man in Kentucky charged with the murder of his estranged wife, a soldier at the U.S. Army’s Fort Campbell. But the decision to seek capital punishment, made by Jeffrey A. Rosen as the acting attorney general during the Trump administration’s last month, was not filed in court until February 2021, before Mr. Garland had assumed his post.
“Rosen authorized and directed the United States attorney’s office for the Western District of Kentucky to seek the death penalty,” a government news release said at the time.
“It seemed like during the Trump administration, there was this push to kill as many people as possible,” said Lisa Peebles, the federal public defender in Syracuse, who represented a client facing a potential death penalty in the armed robbery of a restaurant and the murders of two employees there. The death penalty in her client’s case had been authorized by William P. Barr, then the attorney general under Mr. Trump.
Mr. Garland reversed that decision last June, a court filing shows.
“In the cases that are now being de-authorized,” Ms. Peebles said, “they’re probably taking a very close look at whether or not they should have been authorized in the first instance.”
She said in the case of her client, William D. Wood Jr., the defense and the local U.S. attorney’s office each conducted extensive testing and found he suffered from intellectual deficits, which she said disqualified him from being subject to capital punishment.
Ms. Peebles said the results of both investigations were submitted to the Justice Department, and she believes they influenced the decision. Mr. Wood eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
“Death is supposed to be reserved only for the absolute worst of the worst,” said Michael K. Bachrach, a lawyer who drafted a submission to the Justice Department seeking the withdrawal of the death penalty authorization against a Salvadoran immigrant who had been charged in a kidnapping and murder case in Virginia involving the MS-13 gang.
Last October, Mr. Garland directed the withdrawal of the death penalty request in that case, according to a court filing.
Mr. Bachrach said Mr. Garland’s de-authorizations indicate that “this administration is willing to take a broader look at things, and give more weight toward a defendant’s mitigation and whether or not death is, in fact, necessary in the individual case.”
Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra, noted that “under successive administrations, there has been an institutional process in the Justice Department that attempts to apply consistent standards over the long term.” He said Mr. Trump’s Justice Department appeared to undermine that process by announcing an intention to seek maximum punishments permitted by law.
Mr. Garland’s actions, he suggested, “may well represent an attempt to clean up the record of the prior administration, in order to preserve the long term viability of the federal death penalty against constitutional challenges for arbitrariness.”
Jacqueline K. Walsh, a Seattle lawyer who represented a defendant in Michigan whose death penalty was de-authorized last fall, said she did not “read too much” into the 16 de-authorization decisions.
“They don’t tell us why they de-authorize a case,” Ms. Walsh said.
“But the right thing is happening,” she added. “An administration is thoughtfully considering meaningful information as to why a person’s life should be spared.”
In Manhattan, federal prosecutors have accused Mr. Saipov of plowing a pickup truck down a bike path along the Hudson River on Halloween Day in 2017 — the deadliest terrorist attack in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001, the authorities have said.
Mr. Saipov, prosecutors have said, told the authorities he was inspired by Islamic State videos and had used the vehicle as a weapon to inflict maximum damage on civilians. He carried out the attack for the purpose of joining the Islamic State an indictment said. He has pleaded not guilty.
His federal defender, David E. Patton, has made it clear that if prosecutors withdrew the death penalty request, Mr. Saipov would plead guilty and accept a life sentence.
“President Biden ran on a campaign to end the federal death penalty,” Mr. Patton told Judge Vernon S. Broderick in a hearing about a year ago, adding, “If the government wants to bring closure to this case, it can do so tomorrow and assure that Mr. Saipov never, ever leaves a prison in his life.”
A guilty plea would obviate the need for what could be two trials — the first to determine whether Mr. Saipov was guilty and, if he were convicted, a second on whether he should be executed.
In court on May 4, Mr. Patton told the judge that the defense had submitted its de-authorization request in February but had heard nothing since.
Amanda L. Houle, an assistant U.S. attorney, said the submission was pending before the department’s capital case section.
“We can’t say definitively how many steps there will be,” she noted, saying the process could involve reviews by the capital case section, the office of Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco and then Mr. Garland.
“They are sensitive to the need for a decision,” Ms. Houle added, “given the upcoming trial date.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
