DEATH SENTENCE MAY BE RESTORED IN BOMBER CASE

WASHINGTON U.S. Supreme Court justices on Wednesday leaned toward reinstating convicted 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.

The nine-member court's conservative majority appeared sympathetic toward the Justice Department's effort to overturn a lower-court ruling that tossed out the sentence.

Despite President Joe Biden's stated goal to eliminate capital punishment at the federal level, his administration opted to carry out an appeal of the lower court ruling overturning Tsarnaev's death sentence.

During the argument, Tsarnaev's lawyer Ginger Anders focused her argument on whether U.S. District Judge George O'toole, who presided over the trial, improperly excluded evidence relating to a 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Mass., linked to Tsarnaev's older brother. Lawyers for Tsarnaev, pictured, 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.