Boston bomber sentenced to die by lethal injection

THE Boston bomber was sentenced to death last night.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will face lethal injection – though his lawyers are likely to appeal and it may be years before the case is resolved.

Tsarnaev, 21, was convicted last month of killing three people and injuring 264 after he detonated two homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon’s crowded finish line in 2013.

Three days later, he and his 26-year- old brother shot dead a police officer, carjacked a Chinese businessman and hurled bombs at officers. Last night, after more than 14 hours of deliberation over three days, the jury of seven women and five men sentenced Tsarnaev to death. They found that he deserved the death penalty for some but not all of the charges – which means he will be executed.

Tsarnaev who is of Chechen origin, moved with his family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Russia a decade before the attack. As the sentence was read out he stood expressionless with his hands folded and his head slightly bowed.

The four-month trial included testimony from survivors and gruesome, sometimes graphic videos of the explosions and their bloody aftermath. Tsarnaev was convicted of all 30 federal charges against him on April 8.

Prosecutors said he was an adherent of Al Qaeda’s militant ideology, and wanted to ‘punish America’ with the attack.

They said he deserved to die because of the ‘heinous, cruel and depraved’ way he brought carnage to the marathon. Defence lawyers portrayed him as in the thrall of his older brother Tamerlan – shot dead by police in the manhunt after the bombing.

Eight-year-old Martin Richard, 23-year-old Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu and 29year-old restaurant manager Krystle Camp- bell died in the bombing. The court heard from some of the 18 people who lost limbs in the blast on April 15, 2013.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier was shot dead by the Tsarnaevs three days later.

In the closing arguments, Tsarnaev’s defence lawyer Judy Clarke said ‘Dzhokhar is not the worst of the worst, and that’s what the death penalty is reserved for’.

She asked the jury to choose ‘justice and mercy’ instead of revenge.

Prosecution lawyer Steve Mellin argued: ‘The defendant knew what kind of hell was going to be unleashed.’