Sparks: Supreme court rejects effort to revive plea deal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 9/11 attacks

The profession gathers at the bedside of a case that has lain in fever for a quarter century, and each consultant pronounces gravely on the treatment while declining to wash his hands between examinations.

A tribunal that cannot deliver judgment in twenty-five years has not failed at the task of judgment but at the architecture of the mechanism, and no plea agreement can repair a structure designed without a terminus.

A court that refuses a plea agreement to preserve its own authority over a sentence it cannot pronounce has discovered the oldest principle of institutional life: the procedure outlives the crime, and the tribunal outlives the tribunal's purpose.

If the law cannot conclude what the law began, then the law has not been upheld but merely prolonged, and a punishment deferred is not a punishment rendered.

They call this justice, but a justice that requires the defendant to die before the sentence is pronounced has not been named correctly, and what is not named correctly cannot be administered correctly.

The plea agreement was approved by the convening authority, then suspended by the reviewing authority, then reinstated by the appellate panel, then rejected by the supreme court, which found that the agreement had never been properly approved by the convening authority.

Twenty-five years of hearings have passed, and the families have watched each one, and the court now says the process must continue, but I ask: how much longer can a wound be kept open in the name of healing it?

Twenty-five years, four administrations, three military commissions, two appeals courts, one supreme court, and no verdict - the record shows not delay but design, and the design has no terminus.

There is a gate across this road, and the court has decided not to open it, but no one has explained why the gate was built, and until they do, the refusal is not a principle but a habit.