The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would not revive a plea deal for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and two others accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, clearing the way for the possibility that they could someday face a death penalty trial.
The decision came on a routine orders list, and it did not include any reasoning or public dissents.
The order noted that Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh did not participate in the decision making. The justices are not required to note a reason for recusal, but Justice Kavanaugh had previously served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington Circuit, where he handled cases involving detainees kept at a U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Lawyers for the men accused of planning and carrying out the terrorist attacks had petitioned the Supreme Court to step in and allow a plea agreement that would resolve the case with lifetime sentences, rather than facing a trial with the possibility of the death penalty.
The plea deal had been authorized in 2024 by a senior Defense Department official. Under the terms of the deal, the government had agreed not to seek the death penalty against the men in exchange for their agreement to give up their right to appeal.
A backlash quickly followed. Within days, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III abruptly canceled the deal, putting the death penalty back on the table.
A military judge who reviewed the case had found that the plea deals could go forward, but a federal appeals court rejected that view, upholding the defense secretary’s decision to revoke the agreements.
Lawyers for Mr. Mohammed, who has been held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay since 2006, then filed a petition to the justices, asking them to step in. Mr. Mohammad is accused of being the mastermind who planned the Sept. 11 attacks. The two other men who appealed — Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash — are accused co-conspirators.
The lawyers for Mr. Mohammed had urged the justices to take up the case, asserting that it was of “immense national importance” and that appeals courts were in “disarray” over the procedural questions involved, adding that “the stakes of the specific case are such that this court ought to have the final word.”
Lawyers for the Trump administration had urged the justices to reject the case. In a brief, Solicitor General D. John Sauer acknowledged that the “prosecutions have been lengthy and that the families of petitioners’ victims are divided about whether the continued pursuit of the death penalty is appropriate.”
But Mr. Sauer asserted that the case implicated the interests of the whole country and argued that the appeals court had “properly corrected” what he called “egregious legal errors” by the military judge in allowing the pleas to go forward. He argued there was “no need for this court’s intervention at this juncture.”
A death penalty trial for Mr. Mohammed and others accused in the attacks is projected to last more than a year. A provisional start date has been set for June 5, 2028, but it is contingent on both sides meeting a series of deadlines beforehand. One reason it has taken so long to bring Mr. Mohammed and the others to trial is the issue of their interrogations at Guantánamo in 2007 and 2008. Lawyers for the defendants have continued to assert that the confessions obtained are too tainted by torture to be used against them at trial.
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