Washington – The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would enter legal battle over the fate of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose death sentences were overturned by a lower court last year due to problems with media coverage of the jury.
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court in October to reconsider the ruling of a panel of three justices from the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, urging the judges not to allow the lower court “the final say. “, given the” great stakes of the erroneous “verdict throwing out Tsarnaev’s principal sentences.
The Supreme Court, the Justice Department said, should “put this groundbreaking case back on track and restore its death sentence.” The court is expected to hear the arguments in the case in the next term, which begins in October.
Then Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press in an interview following the lower court’s ruling that the Justice Department would continue to pursue the death penalty for Tsarnaev. But it’s unclear whether that remains the position of the Justice Department under President Biden, which is against the death penalty.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated Monday that Mr. Biden “has serious concerns about whether the death penalty as it is currently applied is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness.” But she said there are no updates on the government’s death penalty policy and referred questions about the dispute to the Justice Department. The department declined to comment on Tsarnaev’s case.
Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which left three dead and more injured. Tsarnaev’s lawyers admitted that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, detonated the two homemade bombs at the finish of the race, but said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the mastermind of the attack.
The brothers attempted to flee the state after the bombing, which led to a days-long manhunt that left Boston and surrounding areas behind. Tsarnaev, now 27, was eventually arrested by police after he was discovered in a boat behind a house in Watertown, Massachusetts, while Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with officers pursuing the brothers.
A federal grand jury has indicted Tsarnaev on 30 counts, including three for using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death, and he was convicted of all crimes for committing the terrorist attack. The jury advised and the court imposed the death penalty on six of the seventeen capital sentences.
Tsarnaev appealed, and the 1st Circuit upheld almost all of his convictions, except for three. But the appeals court also threw out its main sentences and ordered new criminal proceedings.
The Boston court found that the district judge overseeing Tsarnaev’s trial abused his discretion by rejecting requests to ask potential jurors specific questions about the media coverage he or she may have seen or read about the case. The 1st Circuit also found that the district court had erred during the sentence phase of the trial by excluding evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was allegedly involved in murders that took place two years before the bombing, which is the central theory of Tsarnaev’s lawyers under acted would have strengthened. the influence of his brother.
The Trump administration’s decision to continue pursuing the death penalty in Tsarnaev’s case was not entirely surprising. In the summer of 2019, Barr announced his intention to resume executions after nearly two decades of hiatus in carrying out executions at the federal level.
In total, the Trump administration carried out the executions of 13 death row inmates, six of which occurred after Biden won the presidential election in November and before being sworn in on January 20.
When the Supreme Court was urged to appeal last year, the Justice Department argued that the first circuit had “falsely cleared Tsarnaev’s death penalty” in one of the most significant terrorist prosecutions in our nation’s history, “and warned that new criminal proceedings would burden the victims of the attack in 2013 significantly.
“In order to restore the sentences the jury and the court deemed appropriate for the defendant’s heinous acts, the government will have to retry the punitive phase of the case; the court will have to make a ruling (and future jurors will have to undergo) that is likely to be much longer and more burdensome than the original 21-day proceedings; and the victims will have to take a new stand to describe the atrocities the respondent has committed to them, ” then-Attorney General Jeffrey Wall told the court. a request.
But Tsarnaev’s lawyers had asked the Supreme Court not to hear the dispute, arguing that the government would not benefit from a rollback of the lower court’s decision.