Manhattan federal prosecutors showed jurors gory photos of the slain victims in the truck attack on the Hudson River Park bike path on Tuesday, asking them to sentence terrorist Sayfullo Saipov to death for the “callous and calculated” massacre.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Houle, in her summation, said Saipov was “committed to the long game” in his bloodthirsty quest to kill as many Americans as possible in a deluded ISIS-inspired jihad on Halloween 2017.
Saipov, 35, was found guilty of 28 murder and terrorism charges on Jan. 26.
“Here, the defendant murdered eight innocent people. He stole eight lives,” Houle said. She later added, “He is deserving of the most severe punishment the law provides.”
Houle displayed photos of the victims’ mangled corpses on the bike bath after Saipov mowed them down in a 6,000-pound flatbed truck he rented at a Passaic, N.J. Home Depot.
Houle said Saipov wanted to inflict “deep suffering” on his victims’ loved ones. She said he started planning the crime long before he carried out the bloodshed.
“He told the FBI he started following ISIS three years before his attacks. And the defendant had the idea to [commit] an attack a full year before he executed it.”
After the prosecutor showed autopsy photos to the jury, a spectator later revealed to be an FBI agent’s husband, suffered a medical episode, prompting court officials to call emergency services.
Saipov’s lawyer David Patton unsuccessfully asked Judge Vernon Broderick for a mistrial based on the man’s reaction to the pictures.
In his closing argument, Patton asked jurors to exercise the humanity Saipov denied his victims.
“We’re asking you to decide for life, to decide that the appropriate moral decision here is life. Not because Mr. Saipov didn’t cause extraordinary harm, he did. But for some other very fundamental reasons that have nothing to do with sympathy for him,” Patton said.
“It is not necessary to kill Sayfullo Saipov,” the defense lawyer continued. “Meeting death with more death is not the answer.”
Neither Saipov nor his lawyers have denied he carried out the murderous attack. He chose to go to trial rather than plead guilty when prosecutors announced their intention to seek the death penalty.
Lawyers for the Uzbek immigrant, who came to the U.S. in 2010 after winning the visa lottery, argued during the trial that he became brainwashed during long hours indulging in conspiracy theories online as a long-haul truck driver.
Patton argued that sparing his client’s life wouldn’t give him a pass, noting that in the supermax prison where he’ll be sent, ADX Florence — located in the middle of the high desert in Colorado — Saipov will one day die “in obscurity, not as a martyr, not as a hero to anyone.”
The lawyer argued that the love Saipov’s elder relatives and three U.S.-born young kids have for him is alone worth sparing his life.
“I think about his family. And about how they can’t help but believe that the old Saipov they knew is still somewhere in there, and that maybe, in a year from now, 10 years from now, maybe longer, on one of those 15 minute calls, he might just say something along the lines of, ‘My God. What have I done?” Patton said.
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“We’re asking you not to foreclose that possibility,” the lawyer added. “We are asking you to choose hope over fear, justice over vengeance, and, in the end, life over death.”
Prosecutors have called family members of the victims, who testified about the impact of their grief and the trauma the experienced after they lost their loved ones.
Killed in the attack were Ann-Laure Decadt, 31, a Belgian mother of two; five men from Argentina, Hernán Mendoza, Diego Angelini, Alejandro Pagnucco, Ariel Erlij, and Hernan Ferruchi, who were in the city with five other friends from high school to celebrate 30 years of friendship; and Darren Drake, 32, of New Jersey, and 23-year-old New Yorker Nicholas Cleves.
