U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider death penalty in Boston bomber case

It was announced on Monday that the U.S. Supreme Court will review the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two men who set off explosives at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. Tsarnaev, now 27, was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to death, but that decision was overturned by a federal appeals court in July 2020. Now, the Supreme Court will review the case once more, and Tsarnaev’s death sentence could be reinstated.

During his trial, Tsarnaev’s lawyers did not try to prove their client was innocent, and they openly accepted that he and his brother, Tamerlan, had detonated a pair of bombs at the marathon finish line. These explosions killed three people and injured hundreds of others.

Instead of trying to prove his innocence, Tsarnaev’s lawyers simply argued that he was not as guilty as Tamerlan, whom the lawyers claimed to have orchestrated most of the attack. Tamerlan, who was 26 at the time, died a few days after the bombing in a shootout with police.

This approach did not work out for Tsarnaev’s team, and he was given the death penalty. This sentence was overturned, however, when a federal appeals court decided that the judge presiding over Tsarnaev’s original trial had not ensured (or at least not attempted to ensure) that the jury would be unbiased in reaching their verdict.

After the appeal, the court said Tsarnaev would still spend the rest of his life in prison for his “unspeakably brutal acts” in Boston in 2013. As of Monday, that is no longer necessarily Tsarnaev’s fate, and the Supreme Court is likely to hear his trial later in 2021.

posted Saturday March 27th
by Running Magazine