WASHINGTON. On Friday, the Supreme Court reinstated the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of helping to organize the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
The vote was 6 to 3, with three liberal members of the court dissenting.
Explosions near the finish line of the marathon killed three people and injured 260, many of them seriously. Seventeen people lost limbs. When the brothers escaped, a law enforcement officer was killed a few days later. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s older brother and accomplice, died after a shootout with police.
A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston upheld Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s 2020 conviction on 27 counts. But the appellate court ruled that his death sentence should be overturned because the trial judge did not question the jurors in sufficient detail about their exposure to pre-trial publicity and excluded evidence relating to Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Following the appeals court’s decision, attorneys for the federal government under the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to hear the case. After the judges agreed to reconsider, the Biden administration filed United States v. Tsarnaev, no. federal death penalty.
Until July 2020, there were no federal executions in 17 years. In the following six months, the Trump administration executed 13 prisoners, more than three times the number the federal government executed in the previous six decades.
Judge O. Rogery Thompson wrote in the appellate court that there was no dispute about Mr. Tsarnaev’s guilt. But, she added, “the core promise of our criminal justice system is that even the worst of us deserve a fair trial and fair punishment.”
“Just to be very clear,” Judge Thompson wrote, “Dzhokhar will remain in prison for the rest of his life, and the only remaining question is whether the government will end his life by executing him.”
Judge Thompson wrote that the trial judge should not have ruled out evidence implicating Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the 2011 triple murder, which could bolster defense lawyers’ argument that he dominated and bullied his younger brother.
In a 2013 FBI interview, a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev named Ibragim Todashev admitted that he was involved with him in the 2011 robbery of three drug dealers in Waltham, Massachusetts. But he added that Tamerlan Tsarnaev alone cut the throats of the victims. When Mr. Todashev began to write down his confession, he suddenly attacked the agents, who shot him dead.