Washington, D.C. – A U.S. appellate court in Washington has halted plea agreements that would have spared the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two of his co-defendants from the death penalty, marking a dramatic reversal in one of the longest-running terrorism prosecutions in American history.
In a ruling issued Friday, Circuit Judges Patricia Millett and Neomi Rao ruled that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had the legal authority to revoke the proposed plea deals, which were negotiated over two years and approved by military prosecutors and the Pentagon’s convening authority for the Guantanamo Bay war court.
“The Secretary acted within the bounds of his legal authority, and we decline to second-guess his judgment,” the judges wrote.
The plea agreements—offered last year to Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi—would have resulted in life sentences without parole in exchange for guilty pleas. The deals were seen as a possible path to resolve the prolonged legal limbo surrounding the case, which has dragged on for over two decades without a trial.
However, Secretary Austin withdrew the agreements just two days after they were announced, asserting that the American public and families of 9/11 victims deserved a full military trial.
“The families and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commission trials carried out,” Austin said in the justification for his decision.
The defendants—also charged alongside Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Ramzi Bin al Shibh—were first arraigned in 2008, then re-arraigned in 2012, but have remained at Guantanamo Bay Prison under a complex and often stalled pretrial process.
Defense attorneys argued that the plea deals had already taken legal effect and that Austin’s intervention was both untimely and unlawful. A military judge and the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review had initially sided with the defense, clearing the way for plea hearings to begin.
But the D.C. Circuit Court’s decision on Friday reversed that trajectory, ruling that Austin had “indisputable legal authority” to rescind the agreements as the ultimate convening authority.
Judge Robert Wilkins, in a dissenting opinion, rejected the majority’s logic, stating that the government had failed to show that the military judge had clearly erred.
“The government has not come within a country mile of proving clearly and indisputably that the Military Judge erred,” Wilkins wrote.
Victims’ families, some of whom strongly opposed the plea deals, welcomed the ruling.
“This is a good win, for now,” one relative of a 9/11 victim told reporters.
The court’s decision throws the future of the case back into uncertainty, reigniting debate over how justice should be served in the United States’ most consequential terrorism prosecution. Meanwhile, the accused remain detained at Guantanamo Bay, their legal fate once again caught in the crosscurrents of law, politics, and public emotion.
Written by Were Kelly
