NEW YORK — Islamic State-inspired terrorist Sayfullo Saipov on Monday was given the mercy he didn’t offer the eight victims he mowed down on a Manhattan bike path with a rented truck — being spared the death penalty.
In a note sent out shortly after 2 p.m., jurors deliberating whether Saipov should be put to death for the massacre on a busy West Side bicycle lane on Oct. 31, 2017, said they had concluded they were unable to reach a unanimous decision.
Manhattan Federal Court Judge Vernon Broderick took the note as the jury’s final answer.
“There’s nothing in the note that indicates that they are not fully satisfied with where they have come out,” Broderick said.
The judge went through the verdict form in court and ensured that everyone on the panel agreed that they could not come to a unanimous decision and collectively wanted to stop deliberating.
The outcome means Saipov is destined to spend the rest of his days at ADX Florence in Colorado, America’s highest security prison.
Saipov, 35, sat silently as he learned his fate. In January, he was found guilty of 28 murder and terrorism charges related to the attack.
New York outlawed capital punishment in state cases in 2004, but it remained legal in federal cases such as Saipov’s. The last time a Manhattan federal defendant received a death sentence that wasn’t turned over on appeal was in 1954.
The verdict came after a long trial that began with the court taking months to find a panel of jurors without rigid beliefs on the death penalty. The evidence stage lasted about a month, and the death penalty stage took about the same.
Jurors saw gruesome autopsy photos of the victims’ mangled corpses on the bike path, where Saipov, a Uzbekistan native, plowed into them in a 6,000-pound rented flatbed truck.
Prosecutors called the loved ones of the eight victims and more than a dozen of those injured to testify about the horrific attack’s impact on their lives.
Killed in the Halloween attack were Ann-Laure Decadt, 31, a Belgian mother of two who was biking with her mom and two sisters; five men from Argentina — Hernán Mendoza, Diego Angelini, Alejandro Pagnucco, Ariel Erlij and Hernan Ferruchi — who were on a trip to the city with five other friends from high school to celebrate 30 years of friendship, and 23-year-old New Yorker Nicholas Cleves, a software engineer.
The mother of New Jersey victim Darren Drake, 32, cried on the witness stand about how her son didn’t live to learn he had landed the promotion of his dreams.
“He wished that he could just see the recognition and get that title that he had worked so hard for,” Barbara Drake testified on Feb. 21, telling jurors she learned about her son’s planned promotion from his boss at the wake.
“Unfortunately, he was ready to get the title when he was killed. He never found out. He didn’t know. That’s the one thing I feel so sad about, that he never found that he actually — he actually did it.”
Saipov’s lawyers never tried to argue that he was innocent of murder, nor did they cross-examine any of the victims’ loved ones. They said from the trial’s start that Saipov committed a “terrible” crime. His relatives who took the stand said they no longer recognized a brainwashed Saipov.
“He committed a terrible tragedy,” Saipov’s father, Habibulloh Saipov, testified through an interpreter on Feb. 23. “He caused death for eight people and injuries for many more, and he ruined their lives.”
Saipov’s defense contended that he didn’t carry out the horrific attack in a bid to join the Islamic State terror group — as the government argued — but in a deluded quest for martyrdom.
His lawyers said he became radicalized by online conspiracy theories while working as a long-haul truck driver after moving to the U.S. They called an intelligence analyst and expert in ISIS propaganda, Noah Tucker, who testified about the terrorist organization’s effective online targeting and how it looks explicitly for online spaces where migrant workers are gathering.
Saipov’s attorney David Patton argued that it was unrealistic to surmise that ISIS leaders contacted “an Uber driver in Paterson, N.J.” to carry out a terror attack or even knew of Saipov’s existence, even if his client believed differently.
“This was coming from the material that was just swimming on the internet out there,” Patton said in his summation. “If you have bought into this martyrdom notion, this is key, that you only get paradise and safety from doomsday and bringing your family with you and the 72 maidens and all of that only comes if the intention is pure, and it is not to join an organization.”
Saipov’s defense also contended that the government was wrong in arguing he posed too much of a threat to remain alive behind bars at ADX Florence.
Minutes into their deliberations, jurors asked Broderick whether they could discuss the current method of execution in the U.S. being lethal injection or the current moratorium on capital punishment implemented by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, which the judge told them they could not.
