The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday reinstated the death penalty for one of the two perpetrators of the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, in a filing that highlighted President Joe Biden’s contradictions on capital punishment.
The sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 28, 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 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 said.
In 2013, then aged 19, this student of Chechen origin and his older brother Tamerlan planted two homemade bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people, including an eight-year-old child, and 264 wounded.
Identified by surveillance cameras, the two brothers had fled, killing a policeman during their run. Three days after the attack, the eldest was shot dead 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.
” Waste of time “
During his trial in 2015 in Boston, his lawyers claimed that the young man 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.
“The right to an impartial jury does not impose ignorance” of the case, retorted the Supreme Court in its decision.
Similarly, according to the court of appeal, the court of first instance had been 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.
All the protagonists being dead, the court had been right to exclude elements “without character of proof which would have confused the jurors and would have been nothing but a waste of time”, ruled the Court supreme.
The three progressive magistrates expressed their disagreement in a separate text. These elements “were critical for the defense” of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, because they showed the violent nature of his brother and the influence he exerted on his younger brother.
“Difficult to understand”
Although the decision of the Court of Appeals allowed to keep Dzhokhar Tsarnev in prison for life, it was strongly criticized by Donald Trump, 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 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 and once elected, he decreed a moratorium on federal executions.
This apparent contraction was noted during the hearing by conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett.
The administration “declared a moratorium on federal executions but you defend the death penalty” for Djokhar Tsarnaev, she had launched to the representative of the Ministry of Justice. “If you win, he will be condemned to live under the threat of a death penalty which the government does not intend to carry out […] I find it difficult to understand the objective”.