(In February, the Administration announced that it would seek the death penalty on charges against Mohammed and five others; last week, it added a capital case against Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani for his alleged role in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Tanzania).
The case attracted attention in August, when Judge Jeffrey L. Simmons of the Court of Common Pleas in Vinton County told prosecutors that he would not allow them to seek the death penalty because the cost of defending a capital case was too high for the county to bear.
It was only the second time in 30 years that the Oklahoma board had voted for clemency in a capital case, and one of those voting for clemency was a former prosecutor who strongly supports the death penalty.
If Ms. Crawford refers the case for trial as a capital case, it will be the start of a mammoth legal battle, said Neal R. Sonnett, a Miami lawyer who has been an observer at Guantánamo for the American Bar Association.
Huizenga told me that he was trying to get fMRI evidence admitted into a California court for a capital case that he was working on.
But they too were removed, having objected that they did not have the time or resources for a capital case.
At the moment, lawyers for both sides are slogging through the laborious jury-selection process for a capital case, a process requiring that hundreds of people be questioned, one at a time, about everything from their home life to their feelings about race, about capital punishment, about mental retardation.
It's not unusual for a capital case to drag out — whether the defendant is tried in a military commission or a regular court.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others were charged with conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks, a capital case, intended to show the capacity for federal civilian courts to take on the hardest cases.
Judge Granville, as the statute requires, had reviewed the legality of Mr. Bearup's sentence, which he affirmed, though not before rebuking Andrew Thomas, the former county prosecutor, for pursuing a capital case against a man who "even under the state's theory, did not cause the physical death" of Mr. Mathes.
