Supreme Court Reimposes Death Sentence For Boston Marathon Bomber
Joe Harker
Featured Image Credit: Alamy
The US supreme court has reimposed the death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers responsible for three deaths and hundreds of injuries in 2013.
The court ruled 6-3 in favour of reimposing the death sentence, which had initially been handed down to Tsarnaev but had been overturned by a federal appeals court.
Tsarnaev and his elder brother Tamerlan planted two bombs that exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Tamerlan was killed in a firefight with police officers three days after the bombing, while Dzhokhar was captured by police after being found hiding in a boat in the backyard of a house in a Boston suburb.
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That Tsarnaev was guilty was not in doubt, the supreme court's decision was whether he would once again receive the death penalty or continue with his whole life sentence.
According to BBC News, Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by lethal injection after a jury found him guilty in 2015, but an appeals court overturned that verdict after it was deemed that the judge for his trial had failed to exclude jurors who had already decided Tsarnaev was guilty of the bombings.
It was also judged that the trial against Tsarnaev had improperly excluded evidence that may have shown his actions were heavily influenced by his older brother, which would in turn make him partially less responsible for the deaths and injuries caused in the terror attack.
Although the Biden administration said it supports the end of the death penalty, in this case it argued that the federal appeals court had been wrong to dismiss Tsarnaev's death sentence and replace it with a whole life term in prison, CNN reports.
Writing for the majority of judges, Justice Clarence Thomas said: 'Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes.
'The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.'
According to AP, the supreme court's six conservative leaning judges voted to reimpose the death sentence for Tsarnaev, while its three liberal leaning judges voted against it.
Writing for the minority of judges, Justice Stephen Breyer said: 'In my view, the Court of Appeals acted lawfully in holding that the District Court should have allowed Dzhokhar to introduce this evidence.
'I have written elsewhere about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the imposition of the death penalty. This case provides just one more example of some of those problems.'
29-year-old Krystle Campbell, 23-year-old Lingzi Lu and eight-year-old Martin Richard were the victims who lost their lives in the Boston Marathon bombings.
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