No death penalty for terrorist killer of my pal

Days before he was killed by a terrorist in 2017, Nicholas Cleves was at my house cheering for the Yankees as they ultimately lost to the Astros in the playoffs. There was one catch though: he knew basically nothing about baseball. Nick — one of my best friends since my freshman year at college — brought over some terrible beer, which I pretended to like, and made some ignorant comments about why the Yanks weren’t hitting any home runs, which I pretended didn’t bother me.

Soon after, Sayfullo Saipov drove a truck through a bike path in Manhattan, killing eight people including Nick. On Jan. 26, a jury convicted Saipov of murder with the goal of joining ISIS on all of the 28 counts he faced. Now, the jury is deciding whether Saipov should receive the death penalty.

Closure is a personal journey. But in this case, it’s also a legal question with outsized national implications. I don’t know what Nick thought about the death penalty, but I do know that as a talented computer scientist he cared about systems. And it is clear that the death penalty is an immoral and ineffective system.

It has been well documented that the practice is not only rooted in racism, but also perpetuates it. “People of color are more likely to be prosecuted for capital murder, sentenced to death, and executed,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative. EJI also finds that the death penalty is ineffective at deterring crime. In nine of the ten states with the highest murder rates in 2020, the death penalty is legal.

Nor does the death penalty save money. In North Carolina for example, the death penalty costs $2.16 million more per execution than life imprisonment. And most unconscionable is the number of innocent people sentenced to death: for every eight people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated.

While there’s no risk of Saipov being wrongfully convicted — he and his lawyers have admitted to the crime — the death penalty is not a productive means of justice.

Sixteen years before Nick was killed, when we were both living in lower Manhattan, terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, transforming our city into a cloud of smoke. Two years later, President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier with a banner behind him boasting “Mission Accomplished.” As a nine-year-old boy, those wars scratched my itch for revenge.

Now, Bush’s declaration of victory on that ship has become a meme to encapsulate the embarrassing tragedy that the War on Terror became. A report from Brown University says the conflict has cost nearly a million lives and eight trillion dollars. At least 30,000 veterans of the War on Terror have committed suicide, more than four times the number who were killed in action. That rush to find closure and justice instead opened up a deeper wound that will likely never heal.

My frustrations towards Bush extend to President Biden as his approach to capital punishment remains confoundingly hypocritical. On his campaign website, Biden still cites eliminating the death penalty as a core tenet for “strengthening America’s commitment to justice.” Further, his attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium on federal executions because of numerous concerns, including “arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases.”

And yet, the Biden administration is inexplicably advocating that Saipov should be executed. The same Justice Department believes that Patrick Crusius, who posted a manifesto littered with white-supremacist language before he killed 23 people and injured 22 during a mass shooting in El Paso in 2019, should avoid the death penalty. Are the lives taken by an ISIS sympathizer worth more than the lives taken by Crusius? For justice to be just, it must be applied equally, and not based on the political whims of whoever happens to be in power.

Injustice can also be found in jury selection, which mandates potential jurors declare that they are open to imposing the death penalty. Juries are supposed to represent a cross-section of society, and this rule stacks the deck — especially as public support for capital punishment reaches historic lows.

There are endless moral and political reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. But from my perspective, I am still struggling to navigate closure as a personal journey. I still keep one of Nick’s beers in my fridge. And a few months ago, I once again watched the Yankees lose to the Astros in the playoffs. Some things never change.

But some things do. And in abolishing the death penalty, we have the opportunity to institute justice, and reduce suffering.

Grossman and Nicholas Cleves graduated from Skidmore College in 2016. Grossman works for a communications firm in NYC.