penalty, a move denounced by Amnesty International as "a charade based on null and void procedures". His death sentence was overturned in November 2016 and a retrial ordered. Morsi died during trial on 17 June 2019 amid claims that he was being denied appropriate medical care while in custody. Early life and education Mohamed Morsi was born in the Sharqia Governorate, in northern Egypt, of modest provincial origin, in the village of El Adwah, north of Cairo, on 8 August 1951 during the final years of the Egyptian monarchy. His father was a farmer and his mother a housewife. He was the eldest of five brothers, and told journalists that he remembered being taken to school on the back of a donkey. In the late 1960s, he moved to Cairo to study at Cairo University, and earned a BSc in engineering with high honors in 1975. He fulfilled his military service in the Egyptian Army from 1975 to 1976, serving in the chemical warfare unit. He then resumed his studies at Cairo University and earned an MS in metallurgical engineering in 1978. After completing his master's degree, Morsi earned a government scholarship that enabled him to study in the United States. He received a PhD in materials science from the University of Southern California in 1982 with his dissertation on aluminium oxide. Academic and engineering career While living in the United States, Morsi became an assistant professor at California State University, Northridge from 1982 to 1985. In 1985, Morsi quit his job at CSUN and returned to Egypt, becoming a professor at Zagazig University, where he was appointed head of the engineering department. Morsi was a lecturer at Zagazig University's engineering department until 2010. Political career Morsi was first elected to parliament in 2000. He served as a Member of Parliament from 2000 to 2005, officially as an independent candidate because the Brotherhood was technically barred from running candidates for office under President Hosni Mubarak. He was a member of the Guidance Office of the Muslim Brotherhood until the founding of the Freedom and Justice Party in 2011, at which point he was elected by the MB's Guidance Office to be the first president of the new party. While serving in this capacity in 2010, Morsi stated of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that "the two-state solution is nothing but a delusion concocted by the brutal usurper of the Palestinian lands." Morsi