Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: Justice dept will seek to reinstate Boston bombings convict's death penalty, says Bill Barr
Days after President Donald Trump demanded death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose execution was overturned by an appellate court last month, the justice department has raised the matter once again seeking to reinstate the capital punishment.
The Boston bombings of 2013
Dzhokhar was convicted of detonating two home-made pressure cooker bombs at the marathon on April 15, 2013, near the finishing line of the race, killing three and injuring more than 250. Three days later, the FBI released images of Kyrgyzstani-American Dzhokhar and his elder brother Tamerlan as two suspects. After the duo was identified, they killed an MIT cop, kidnapped a man in his car and had a shootout with the police in nearby suburb Watertown during which two policemen were severely injured (one died later). Tamerlan got shot several times and was run over by Dzhokhar’s car as the latter fled. Dzhokhar was arrested on April 19 after a massive manhunt started and he was found hiding inside a boat in the backyard of a resident in Watertown.
On Thursday, August 20, Attorney General William "Bill" Barr told the Associated Press in an interview that the justice department would appeal the July ruling and sought a trial to determine whether he should be executed for the attack. Barr also said the department would take the matter to the Supreme Court. “We will do whatever's necessary. We will take it up to the Supreme Court and we will continue to pursue the death penalty,” Barr said.
The justice department under Barr, who took office in February last year, has been carrying out federal executions and has put three persons to death so far. At least three more executions are scheduled for next week and also in September, irrespective of the coronavirus pandemic and plummeting public support for death penalty. According to Barr, 70, it is the justice department’s duty to carry out whatever sentencing the courts have imposed, including death penalty, and to deliver justice for the victims’ families.
Last month, a three-judge panel of the 1st US Circuit Court found that the judge who oversaw the 2015 trial stopped short of adequately questioning potential jurors what they had read or heard about the case. The defense said Dzhokhar and Tamerlan carried out the attacks but tried to portray the latter as a radicalized mastermind who they said dragged his younger brother into the act of violence. Tamerlan was aged 26 at that time while Dzhokhar was 20. Now 27, Dzhokhar was convicted of all 30 charges against him, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and even killing the MIT policeman. The appellate court upheld all but a few of his convictions.
David Patton, an attorney of Dzhokhar, refused to comment on Thursday. He said after the 1st Circuit’s decision that “it is now up to the government to determine whether to put the victims and Boston through a second trial, or to allow closure to this terrible tragedy by permitting a sentence of life without the possibility of release.”
According to the prosecutors, Dzhokhar was culpable in the attack which they felt was aimed at punishing the US for its war in various Muslim nations. In the boat where Dzhokhar was found hiding, he wrote: “Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
Calling the media attention in the case as “unrivaled in American legal history”, the appeals court said US District Judge George O'Toole fell short in running a jury selection process “sufficient to identify prejudice”. The 1st Circuit also found that O’Toole made a mistake in refusing to let the defense inform the jurors about evidence linking Tamerlan to the killings of three persons in the Boston suburb of Waltham in 2011.
“If the judge had admitted the Waltham evidence — evidence that shows (like no other) that Tamerlan was predisposed to religiously-inspired brutality before the bombings and before Dzhokhar's radicalization — the defense could have more forcefully rebutted the government's claim that the brothers had a ‘partnership of equals’,” Circuit Court Judge O Rogeriee Thompson wrote in the ruling.