VOn Friday March 4, the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty for one of the two perpetrators of the deadly Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, which left 3 dead and 264 injured. The sentence of Djokhar Tsarnaev, a student of Chechen origin who had committed this attack with his brother, had been invalidated on appeal for procedural questions related to the composition of the jury and the exclusion of elements during the trial.
The High Court overturned that decision by a majority of six out of nine justices, all of whom were conservatives. “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees him a fair trial by an impartial jury and he got it,” she wrote in her judgment. In 2013, then 19 years old, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan planted two homemade bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, causing carnage.
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Joe Biden’s promises to abolish capital punishment
Identified by surveillance cameras, the two brothers had fled, killing a policeman during their run. The eldest had been shot during a confrontation with the police. Djokhar Tsarnaev was found injured, hidden in a boat. He had written on a wall that he wanted to avenge the Muslims killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2015, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was overturned in 2020 by an appeals court which cited two irregularities.
Even if this decision made it possible to keep Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in prison for life, it had been strongly criticized by Donald Trump, who was then president. Fervent supporter of the death penalty, he had asked his government to seize the Supreme Court. Once in the White House, Joe Biden could have withdrawn that request, but he let it take its course. During his campaign, the Democrat had nevertheless promised to work to abolish the death penalty at the federal level.