USA: DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE WILL NOT SEEK DEATH PENALTY AGAINST AHMED ABU KHATTALA

May 10, 2016: The United States Department of Justice has announced that it will not seek the death penalty against Ahmed Abu Khattala, 54, who, the indictment alleges, led the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed.
The announcement, contained in a notice to the federal trial court in Washington, clears the way for a major terrorism trial in the nation’s capital, the first in the United States since 2015, barring a plea agreement by Abu Khattala. The decision ended a lengthy review after President Obama aired concerns in October that while he supported capital punishment in theory, he found it “deeply troubling” in practice.
The move marked somewhat of a shift for the Justice Department, one year after federal prosecutors last May secured a death sentence in a capital terrorism case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. The department in November approved its first new capital prosecution under Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch — who called the death penalty an “effective punishment” before her Senate confirmation in April 2015 — against Noe Aranda-Soto, an illegal immigrant accused of human trafficking and murder in Texas.
However, analysts said the government faced a difficult calculation in the Benghazi case, pointing to complex legal, political and national security concerns that have produced a mixed record in capital terrorism cases, and to a history in which no D.C. jury has ever imposed the death penalty. “We do these on a case-by-case basis,” a Justice Department official said, declining to elaborate. Legal observers noted challenges facing the U.S. government in bringing witnesses from Libya to testify in a U.S. courtroom amid sectarian conflict in the region. A trial date before U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper of the District has not been set.
Abu Khattala commanded a brigade absorbed by the extremist anti-Western group Ansar al-Sharia, which carried out the attacks on Sept. 11 and 12, 2012, that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others, according to U.S. investigators.
The U.S. government in January 2014 designated Abu Khattala a terrorist and Ansar al-Sharia, an armed militia that seeks to establish sharia law in Libya, a terrorist organization.
The Obama administration authorized Abu Khattala’s capture in a June 2014 U.S. Special Operations raid in Libya after he was lured to a villa south of Benghazi.
He pleaded not guilty. (Sources: DPIC, 10/05/2016)