9/11 Families Face More Delays As Trial Pushed To 2028

For 9/11 families, the courtroom has become another place of waiting, and the wait keeps stretching. A trial for accused mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three co-defendants is now tentatively set for June 2028, turning a case tied to one of the darkest days in U.S. history into a test of endurance, memory, and faith in justice.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks, and the legal aftermath has moved at a crawl ever since. The latest delay is especially painful because it comes after years of stalled proceedings, legal challenges over evidence, and repeated setbacks that have pushed any real resolution farther and farther out of reach.

John Ryan, a former Port Authority police chief who spent months working recovery at Ground Zero, described the case as “an open sore,” and that image fits the mood around it. For families and first responders, every anniversary reopens the same wound, only now it is mixed with the frustration of watching justice remain just beyond reach.

The obstacles are not small. Prosecutors have run into major problems over statements Mohammed made to FBI agents after harsh treatment in CIA custody, with a military judge ruling those statements could not be used because they were tainted by coercion. That ruling matters because it goes right to the heart of how the government can build its case without relying on evidence tied to torture.

The government decided not to appeal the ruling, apparently unwilling to risk pushing the trial date even further back. That says a lot about how fragile the timeline has become, since even a simple legal fight can send the whole case spinning into another long delay.

The defendants have already lived in legal limbo for years. Mohammed, captured in Pakistan in 2003, was held in CIA black sites, later transferred to Guantánamo in 2006, and then arraigned in 2012 along with the others, but the case still has not produced a trial verdict. One of the co-defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, has been separated out after being found mentally incompetent to stand trial.

That kind of broken timeline has worn down the families. Sean Passananti, whose father died in the North Tower, said it feels unreal that people are still fighting for justice this long after the attacks, and that the whole process has started to feel like a “twilight zone.”

Passananti still shows up for the memorial nearly every year, carrying grief that never really fades. The ritual itself has become part of the burden, because each gathering is both a remembrance and a reminder that the case is still unfinished.

Dennis McGinley, who lost his brother Danny, put it in starker terms, saying the pain keeps getting reopened. His words reflect a broader feeling among families that the system has dragged on so long that the original crime and the legal response no longer seem to match in scale.

The case has also been battered by practical chaos. There have been multiple military judges, a pandemic, unresolved motions, and even a plea deal in 2024 that would have spared the defendants from the death penalty before Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin withdrew it and sent everything back into litigation.

That collapsed plea agreement created another round of confusion and anger, especially because it seemed to offer a path forward and then vanished. Instead of closure, the families got another reminder that nothing about this prosecution comes easily, and nothing is ever final for long.

Years ago, there was even an attempt to move the case into federal court in Manhattan. That plan collapsed under political and security pressure, and the prosecution was shifted back to the military commissions at Guantánamo, where the case has stayed while the defendants continue aging in custody and taxpayers keep footing a massive bill.

Ryan, who later worked in counterterrorism, said the case should have been about justice in a fair amount of time, not decades of drift. That frustration hangs over every new ruling and every missed deadline, with families still waiting for the day when the system finally stops stalling and faces the damage head-on.