The Supreme Court on Monday refused to revive the plea deals that would have spared Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the September 11 attacks, from the death penalty — leaving in place the ruling that let the Pentagon scrap the agreements and keeping a capital trial on track at Guantanamo Bay. The justices turned away appeals by Mohammed and two co-defendants, Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Walid bin 'Atash, who had also signed plea agreements, of a lower court's ruling that upheld then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's decision to void the deals. The court gave no reasons, as is typical, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh took no part in considering two of the three petitions.
Austin "indisputably had legal authority to withdraw from the agreements." — U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
The plea agreements, offered and accepted in the summer of 2024 by the official overseeing the Pentagon's Guantanamo war court, would have taken the death penalty off the table in exchange for guilty pleas from the men accused of orchestrating the hijacked-plane attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. The deals drew immediate criticism from Republican lawmakers and some victims' families, and Austin revoked them two days later. A military judge ruled that Austin had acted too late and lacked the authority to invalidate the agreements, a decision upheld in December by the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, and plea hearings were scheduled. The D.C. Circuit paused those proceedings and ruled in July 2025, by a 2-1 vote, that Austin had the legal authority to withdraw.
Defense attorneys for Mohammed and al-Hawsawi, including lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, had urged the Supreme Court to take the case, arguing that Austin's intervention violated controlling military law and, in their words, prolonged "the best chance for finality in the September 11 case in a quarter century." With the court's refusal, that argument is exhausted, and the prosecution returns to a full capital trial. In August, a U.S. Air Force judge set the trial of Mohammed and his co-defendants for June 2028 — nearly 27 years after the attacks.
Mohammed remains the best-known detainee at Guantanamo Bay, the detention facility set up in 2002 under President George W. Bush to hold foreign terrorism suspects after 9/11. He is accused of orchestrating the plot to fly hijacked passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Supreme Court's action is the latest milestone in a military prosecution that has spent two decades in legal gridlock without reaching a trial; pretrial hearings in the case are expected to continue at Guantanamo ahead of the 2028 date.
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