The Supreme Court refused Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s bid to restore a 2024 plea deal that would have spared the Sept. 11 mastermind the death penalty.
In Washington on Monday, the justices turned away the effort by the man long identified as the principal architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, with no noted dissents. Justice Brett Kavanaugh recused himself from the matter.
The decision leaves in place the cancellation of a controversial agreement that would have let Mohammed plead guilty and serve life without parole instead of facing capital punishment. His military trial is now set to begin June 5, 2028, at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has been held for more than two decades.
The New York Post reported the high court rejection of Mohammed’s push to revive the deal reached with the Office of Military Commissions.
Mohammed faces 2,977 counts of murder, terrorism, and violations of the law of war, among other charges. Those figures match the number of people killed when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pa.
On July 31, 2024, Mohammed and two co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, reached an agreement with the Office of Military Commissions. They would plead guilty and accept life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Two days later, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin rescinded the agreement. Austin said only the Pentagon chief could authorize such a deal. The move came amid a national outcry over sparing the death penalty for the accused 9/11 plotters.
A divided panel of the D.C. appeals court upheld Austin’s action last year. Mohammed then sought Supreme Court intervention to put the plea back in force. The justices declined.
Kavanaugh sat out the case. He had served in the George W. Bush White House counsel’s office at the time of Mohammed’s capture in 2003.
A bipartisan commission report published in 2004 described Mohammed as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” He and four other accused men were first charged in 2008 and recharged four years later.
At a 2007 U.S. military hearing, Mohammed left little doubt about his role.
He told the hearing:
"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,"
In the same setting he claimed he was “very sorry” children were killed in the attack and insisted, “I don’t like to kill people.”
Those words sit beside the scale of the plot. Nearly 3,000 people died in a single morning. Families have waited through almost 25 years of delay for a trial on the merits.
As recently as August, a military judge threw out statements Mohammed made about the attacks to the FBI in 2007. The judge ruled those statements were not voluntarily given. The FBI obtained them four years after his 2003 capture.
The CIA had conducted so-called “enhanced interrogation” sessions in the years after the attacks. Defense challenges to the reliability and voluntariness of later statements have repeatedly slowed the case.
Even with those rulings, the core charges remain. Mohammed still stands accused of murder on a mass scale, terrorism, and law-of-war violations tied directly to the deaths of 2,977 people.
With the plea deal off the table and the Supreme Court unwilling to revive it, the military commission process moves forward. Proceedings are scheduled to open June 5, 2028, at Guantanamo Bay.
Mohammed has already spent more than twenty years in detention there. The victims’ families have spent the same stretch without a full public reckoning in court.
Austin’s rescission kept the death penalty available. The D.C. appeals court left that decision intact. The Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene does the same. The case now returns to the path of a contested military trial rather than a negotiated life sentence.
Accountability for the worst terrorist attack on American soil was never supposed to turn on a quiet plea that erased capital consequences. The high court left that principle standing.
