Judge tosses media & public from courtroom

The judge presiding over Sayfullo Saipov’s death penalty trial shut reporters and the public out of the courtroom on Tuesday.

Manhattan Federal Court Judge Vernon Broderick on Friday ordered that reporters had to watch the highstakes trial in overflow rooms due to the high number of witnesses and people otherwise “essential to the trial” attending the proceedings.

The Daily News joined other media outlets to successfully challenge the ruling.

Matthew Leish, The News’ lawyer, said closed-circuit television monitors do not allow reporters to observe a defendant’s demeanor or other details of interest to the public, and the audio feed frequently cuts out. Leish asked Broderick to at least permit a pool reporter access to the proceedings.

After sending the jury home for the day, Broderick said he would reserve a bench “all the way in the back” for members of the media starting Wednesday.

Saipov, 35, was convicted in January of fatally running down eight people on the west side bike path on Oct. 31, 2017, and injuring more than a dozen in an ISIS-inspired truck attack. He used a rented U-Haul van as his weapon.

The same jury that convicted the Uzbekistan native is now hearing evidence about whether he should be put to death. Government prosecutors have re-called as witnesses several family members of the dead, who testified about their grief. Saipov’s lawyers are expected to call his relatives and experts on propaganda by the Islamic State terror group.

Saipov’s defense has said he grew up in a tight-knit family that does not share his extremist views.

During the death penalty phase’s opening argument, David Stern told jurors that they would hear from experts about how ISIS considers Uzbek migrants like him easy targets for propaganda as the study and practice of Islam were suppressed in the satellite Soviet state when he was growing up.

They had argued that Saipov’s descent into radicalization happened when he moved to the U.S. after winning the visa lottery and started working as a long-haul truck driver.

During “long hours of isolation away from his family,” Saipov “tried desperately to get his family on the phone [to] talk to him as long as they could, but they couldn’t fill the long hours,” Stern said, so he passed the time online consuming conspiracy theories.

Saipov’s lawyers also plan to argue that he has three young children, ages 5, 7, and 9, who still love him, giving meaning to his life.