The US Supreme Court has reinstated the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the perpetrator of the deadly Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013, which left three people dead and 264 injured. “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 stop.
In 2013, then aged 19, he and his older brother Tamerlan planted two pipe bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, causing carnage. 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.
During his 2015 trial in Boston, his lawyers claimed that the young man, 19 years old at the time, was under the influence of his self-radicalized elder. Without denying the seriousness of the facts, they had pleaded for life imprisonment. The jurors were unconvinced and opted for the death penalty. In 2020, a federal appeals court upheld the guilty verdict but overturned the death sentence citing two irregularities.
For her, in this highly publicized case, it would have been necessary to question the potential jurors on what they had read or seen at the time of the attack, in order to exclude those who had already formed their opinion.
Series of federal executions under Donald Trump
Similarly, she had judged, the court was wrong to reject a request from the defense which wanted to evoke a triple murder dating back to 2011, probably committed by the eldest of the Tsarnaevs, as proof of his character as a leader. Even if this decision made it possible to keep Djokhar Tsarnev 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Once in the White House, Joe Biden might have withdrawn this request but he let it take its course.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. In July 2021, US Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions while the Justice Department continues its death penalty review. “The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only granted the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely.”Merrick Garland said in a statement.
In the United States, it is traditionally the States, and not the federal power, which execute the most. Federal justice generally only intervenes in cases involving drugs, terrorism or espionage. The federal authorities had not carried out a single execution in seventeen years, until July 2020. The Trump administration had then resumed with this practice and had chained them at an unprecedented rate – thirteen -, despite the decline in capital punishment in the United States and around the world.
