DENVER — The only person ever convicted in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack has asked to be transferred from federal prison in Colorado to France, saying he fears he will be executed if Donald Trump is elected president in November.
Zacarias Moussaoui, 56, now serving a life sentence at the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, said in a handwritten letter on file in the court docket that he worries he will be deemed a “threat to national security” under a Trump administration.
“Your honor, as presinding [sic] and sentencing judge your Court sentenced me at life without parole,” said Moussaoui in the May 13 note, which was reposted Tuesday on the Legal Insurrection website.
“Instead your Honor might concur that there is a possibility if not a probability that if the Ex US President Donald Trump was to be reelected He will sentence me to death by presidential executive order,” Moussaoui said in his note, which frequently reflected that he is not a lawyer and does not speak English well.
A French citizen who was arrested on an immigration violence a month before the 9/11 attacks, Moussaoui pleaded guilty to the federal conspiracy charges and was sentenced by a jury to six consecutive life sentences.
Why the sudden concern about execution?
Moussaoui said in his note that he was warned by a lawyer and a professor “that US law permit the US president to sentence to death any federal [prisoner] [deemed] to be a threat to National security.”
Exclusive: Imprisoned 9/11 Terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui Fears Execution If Trump Wins, Requests Transfer to France, via @JamesRNault https://t.co/2msWarkWyV
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) July 23, 2024
Cornell Law School Professor William Jacobson, who runs the Legal Insurrection blog, said that it’s not unusual for prisoners to write handwritten notes to the court because “they rarely have access to computers.”
He also said Moussaoui’s fears of a Trump-ordered execution are unfounded.
Asked whether a U.S. president may order a prisoner executed via executive order, Mr. Jacobson said, “No, of course not, but apparently he doesn’t know that!”
He said that Legal Insurrection was alerted to the filing by “a reader who lost a family member on 9/11 that Moussaoui had requested a transfer to France, and the reader was concerned that once there he may be released by the French.”
In his letter, Moussaoui said that “I want to apply to this Court and the US government to be transfer to France to finish my sentence,” instead of spending the rest of his days at the prison known as Supermax.
Mr. Trump, a Republican who served as president from 2017 to 2021, is running in the November election to succeed President Biden, who is not seeking reelection.
“I could be transfer to France to serve the rest of my life sentence and before the potential inauguration of ex-President Trump,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, who oversaw the Moussaoui trial, has not filed a reply in the court docket.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four commercial airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania following a passenger revolt.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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