Legal News

KSM Trial Likely Leaving New York and Heading to . . . Dutchess County?

By Ashby Jones

We don’t know where the KSM trial is going to happen, but it’s increasingly looking like it’s not going to be in NYC.

The WSJ is reporting, citing an Obama administration official, that the DOJ is likely to relocate the 9/11 conspiracy trial from a courthouse near the World Trade Center site to, well, possibly somewhere else in the Southern District of New York. (The SDNY, all Manhattanites should know if they don’t already, reaches all the way up to Dutchess County in the Hudson River Valley.)

"We're considering options," said Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd. Another official said the administration is moving toward a decision on abandoning the lower Manhattan site but hasn't made a final choice yet.

New York City officials said a dawning awareness in recent weeks that the trial would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and force them to restrict access to a significant chunk of lower Manhattan prompted the pressure on Washington to change course.

Administration officials would not rule out moving the trial away from New York entirely. The wide-ranging nature of the attacks–which saw planes hijacked in Boston and Newark and crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., and a field in Shanksville, Pa.–gives the Justice Department some discretion over where to file charges.

Personally, we like the Governors Island idea.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 29, 2010 (boomark / email).