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 U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf sentenced Stephen Silva, who was
arrested in July 2014, to time served plus three years' supervised
release for the charges that he pleaded guilty to last year.
Silva was not accused of playing any role in the April 15, 2013,
bombing at the Boston Marathon finish line, which killed three
people and injured 264, but admitted having possessed a handgun with
its serial number filed off.
He testified in March that he lent that gun, a Ruger P95, to
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who told him he wanted it to rob college students
in Rhode Island.
Tsarnaev was found guilty in April of carrying out the bombing
attack along with his older brother, as well as shooting dead
Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier
three days later.
 Tsarnaev's older brother, Tamerlan, 26, died following a gunfight
with police later that night and it was never established which of
the pair pulled the trigger to kill Collier.
"I would like to apologize for the crimes I committed. For he
record, I had no idea that the firearm I lent to Mr. Tsarnaev would
be used in the way it was," Silva told the judge before his sentence
was read. "I was young, dumb and thought I could outsmart everyone."
Prosecutors had sought an 18-month sentence, citing the defendant's
cooperation in the bombing investigation. They noted that he
testified that Tsarnaev, whom he had been friends with since
childhood, had actively sought the gun from him, evidence that
helped undercut Tsarnaev's lawyers assertion that he had been a
secondary player in a plot planned by his older brother.
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"You were at a crossroads and you certainly went in the wrong way,"
Wolf said. "You didn't just go in the wrong way, you got a gun, gave
it to your friend and as a result of that, now a police officer is
dead."
Silva is the last of five people associated with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
to face criminal charges related to the bombing. Three of his
college friends and a cab driver who had been friends with both
brothers were in June sentenced to three to six years in prison for
lying to investigators.
Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by lethal injection and plans to
appeal.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Alistair Bell and Frances
Kerry)
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