Supreme Court urged to restore death penalty
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration will seek to persuade the Supreme Court this week to reinstate the death penalty for convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by arguing that a jury had no need to examine evidence that the government itself relied on at an earlier phase of the case.
Tsarnaev’s guilt in the deaths of three people in the shocking bombing near the finish line of the marathon in 2013 is not at issue in the case the justices will hear Wednesday — just whether he should be sentenced to life in prison, or death.
Nor is the court likely to ponder the administration’s aggressive pursuit of a capital sentence for Tsarnaev even as it has halted federal executions and President Biden has called for an end to the federal death penalty.
Instead, the main focus will be on evidence that Tsarnaev’s lawyers wanted the jury to hear that supported their argument that his older brother, Tamerlan, was the mastermind of the attack and that the impressionable younger brother was somehow less responsible. The evidence implicated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a triple killing in the Boston suburb of Waltham on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The federal appeals court in Boston ruled last year that the trial judge made a mistake in excluding the evidence and threw out Tsarnaev’s death sentence.
The Trump administration, which carried out 13 executions in its last six months, quickly appealed. When the new administration didn’t indicate any change of view, the court agreed to review the case.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers have never contested that he and his brother set off the two bombs near the marathon finish line on April 15, 2013. Lingzi Lu, 23; Krystle Campbell, 29; and 8year-old Martin Richard were killed. More than 260 others were injured.
Police captured a bloodied and wounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where he was hiding in a boat parked in a backyard, hours after his brother died. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had been in a gunfight with police and was run over by his brother as he fled.
Tsarnaev, now 28, was convicted of all 30 charges against him.
The 2011 killings, defense lawyers said, went to the heart of their argument that Tsarnaev was deeply influenced and radicalized by his brother, who already had shown a capacity for extreme violence.