The Supreme Court backed the Pentagon’s move to revoke plea deals shielding three alleged 9/11 plotters from the death penalty, restoring capital punishment as an option.
The nation’s highest court on Monday sided with the Defense Department and left intact the decision to scrap plea agreements that would have locked in life sentences and taken the death penalty off the table for three men tied to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Reporting on the ruling centers on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, long described as the suspected mastermind of the attacks, along with Mustafa al Hawsawi and Walid bin ‘Attash. All three are held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The deals they accepted would have traded guilty pleas for life in prison and no capital sentence. That path is now closed again.
The justices offered no written explanation. The practical result is straightforward: military commission proceedings can keep moving, and the government retains the option of seeking death.
Families of the nearly 3,000 people murdered on Sept. 11 have waited more than two decades for a full reckoning. Soft bargains that erase the death penalty never matched the scale of that crime.
In 2024, retired Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, appointed by then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to oversee the military commissions’ handling of the detention cases, approved the plea agreements. Only days after those deals became public, Austin moved to overturn them.
A military judge later ruled that Austin had acted too late because the three suspects had already begun the tasks required under the agreements. A military appellate court backed that finding. The government then took the fight to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which allowed the withdrawal on a 2-1 vote.
The three detainees challenged that result. The Supreme Court left the D.C. Circuit’s decision in place. The Washington Examiner reported the high court’s alignment with the Pentagon’s revocation and the restored death-penalty path.
That sequence matters. A Biden-era secretary first green-lit deals that removed the ultimate penalty, then reversed course under pressure. Lower courts split on whether the reversal came too late. The D.C. Circuit and now the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Pentagon to stand by the withdrawal.
Readers tracking other high-court fights this term will recognize the pattern of major institutional questions reaching the justices, including the Supreme Court term’s mix of policy cases already on the docket.
In August, a military judge scheduled a June 2028 trial date for Mohammed. The same judge ruled that Mohammed’s 2007 confession to FBI agents was not voluntary and excluded it from evidence.
Several confessions in these long-running cases have already been thrown out because of CIA torture. That evidentiary damage is real and self-inflicted. It does not erase the underlying charges or the government’s duty to finish the cases. It does explain why a trial date still sits years away, nearly a quarter-century after the attacks.
Breitbart noted that the Supreme Court declined to review the 2024 revocation, that the appeals court had backed Austin’s authority to cancel the deals, and that the earliest realistic military commission remains 2028 because of unresolved issues that include torture-derived evidence.
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck put the immediate effect in plain terms.
Vladeck told CNN:
"The practical effect of today’s denials of certiorari is to clear the way for the inexorable pre-trial proceedings in these cases to continue."
Pre-trial work will grind on. The death penalty remains legally available. That is the posture the Pentagon wanted and the one the Supreme Court refused to disturb.
Separate disputes at the Court have also drawn attention this cycle, from the 7-2 decision favoring the Trump administration on political ad rates to other procedural fights over agency rules.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who once served a year at Guantanamo Bay, traveled to the base at the start of his tenure and visited Mohammed. Asked how the detainee looked, Hegseth did not soften his answer.
Hegseth said:
"I don’t really care."
He continued:
"But he’s fine, and I hope he finds justice soon. This is one of the rare things I agree with my predecessor on, Lloyd Austin, that he deserves the death penalty, and I hope he finds it soon, through that system."
That is the clearest public statement from the current civilian leader of the department: the man accused of masterminding the murder of thousands should face the death penalty inside the military commission system, not a bargained life term.
Austin’s late 2024 withdrawal already pointed in the same direction. Hegseth’s remarks show continuity on the core point even as administrations changed. Justice delayed is still not justice denied if the capital option survives.
Other recent Court matters have kept the institution in the headlines, including efforts such as the push described in coverage of Harris’s call for Court expansion and popular-vote changes, which underscore how contested the Court’s role remains in national politics.
Guantanamo Bay still holds 15 detainees nearly 25 years after the facility opened. Three of them, Guled Hassan Duran, Ismail Ali Faraj Ali Bakush, and Muieen A Deen Jamal-A Deen Abd al Fusal Abd al Sattar, are eligible for transfer back to their native countries.
Of the remaining 12, only two have been convicted. Seven face charges. Not all of those cases are tied to the Sept. 11 attacks. Mohammed has been held at the base since 2006. The three men at the center of Monday’s Supreme Court action remain among the highest-profile defendants still awaiting a completed trial.
The plea deals would have ended the capital risk for the three alleged plotters and converted their cases into life sentences. Austin’s withdrawal, the D.C. Circuit’s 2-1 ruling, and the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene kept that risk alive. A June 2028 trial date now sits on the calendar for Mohammed, even with the 2007 FBI confession excluded.
For a national audience that still remembers the smoke over New York, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, the question has never been complicated. The people accused of planning the mass murder of civilians should face the full range of lawful punishment, not a negotiated escape from it.
Related litigation continues to reach the justices in other arenas, including the freeze on lower-court action over FCC TV ad rate rules, another reminder that major institutional fights keep landing on the same docket.
The Court did not say an opinion explaining Monday’s result. It did not need to. The deals that erased the death penalty are gone. The cases move forward. The victims’ families are still waiting for a verdict that matches the crime.
A nation that lost thousands in a single morning does not owe their accused killers a bargain that takes the ultimate penalty off the table.