U.S. Supreme Court weighs Boston Marathon bomber's death sentence
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[October 13, 2021]
By Lawrence Hurley and Nate Raymond
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme
Court on Wednesday is set to hear the federal government's bid to
reinstate Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence for
his role in the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded more
than 260 others.
Despite President Joe Biden's stated goal to eliminate capital
punishment at the federal level, his administration opted to carry out
an appeal - initially launched by the Justice Department under his
predecessor Donald Trump - of a lower court ruling overturning
Tsarnaev's death sentence.
No federal inmates had been executed for 17 years before Trump oversaw
13 executions in the last six months of his term.
One of the issues before the nine justices is whether the global media
attention that the bombing garnered may have influenced jurors - a
question that the lower court found that U.S. District Judge George
O'Toole, who presided over the trial, did not sufficiently address
during the jury selection process.
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The justices also will consider whether O'Toole improperly excluded
evidence relating to a triple murder in 2011 linked to Tsarnaev's older
brother. Lawyers for Tsarnaev, who is 28 now and was 19 at the time of
the attack, have argued that he played a secondary role in the bombing
to his brother Tamerlan, who they describe as "an authority figure" with
"violent Islamic extremist beliefs."
Victims of the bombing are divided over whether Tsarnaev should be
executed.
The government is challenging a lower court's 2020 decision ordering a
new trial over the sentence Tsarnaev should receive for the death
penalty-eligible crimes for which he was convicted. Whatever the Supreme
Court decides in a ruling due by the end of June, Tsarnaev would at a
minimum remain in prison for the rest of his life. He is incarcerated at
the "Supermax" federal prison in Florence, Colorado.
The Tsarnaev brothers detonated two homemade
pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon's finish line on April 15, 2013,
and days later killed a police officer. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a
gunfight with police.
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Storm clouds roll in over the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington,
U.S., September 1, 2021. REUTERS/Tom Brenner
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Jurors convicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on all 30 counts he faced and
determined he deserved execution for a bomb he planted that killed
Martin Richard, 8, and Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 23.
Restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, was killed by the second
bomb.
In overturning Tsarnaev's death sentence but not his convictions,
the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that
O'Toole "fell short" in screening jurors for potential bias
following pervasive news coverage of the bombings.
The Justice Department has argued that the 1st Circuit failed to
defer to O'Toole's broad authority as the trial judge to manage jury
selection, as allowed under court precedents. The department also
had argued that admitting evidence about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's
possible involvement in the prior triple murder would not have
affected to the outcome.
Tsarnaev's lawyers have said O'Toole's decisions deprived him of his
constitutional right to a fair trial and also violated the Federal
Death Penalty Act, which outlines the procedure for imposing the
death penalty under federal law.
This year's Boston Marathon took place on Monday.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley in Washington and Nate Raymond in
Boston; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)
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