The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Friday, reversing a federal appeals court decision contending that he was denied due process when the judge in his trial excluded certain evidence and testimony that the defense team believes could have lessened his sentence.
In its 6-3 ruling, the High Court rejected the U.S Court of Appeals’ argument that the judge in Tsarnaev’s case had wrongfully refused to admit evidence including the fact of Tsarnaev’s older brother previous involvement in a triple murder many years earlier. Another objection to the judge’s conduct was that he disallowed questioning of jurors by defense attorneys about the potentially inflammatory and biased news coverage they had been exposed to in the months before serving on the panel.
Speaking for the majority on the bench, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes…The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.”
Penning the dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, agreed with the Court of Appeals ruling, suggesting that such cases must be treated with caution, deliberation, and thoroughness because the punishment is so severe and a wrongful conviction is possible.
When “death is at stake…particular judicial care,” he said. “In my view, the Court of Appeals acted lawfully in holding that the District Court should have allowed Dzhokhar to introduce this evidence.”
Tsarnaev was convicted of constructing and detonating two explosives at two different points near the race’s finish line in 2013, killing three people and injuring hundreds. His brother Tamerlan, who collaborated with him to plan and execute the attack, was killed in a subsequent shootout with police four days after the bombing. The pair first planned to hit Boston, then Times Square in New York with separate weapons they’d built from scratch in a Cambridge, Mass. apartment.
After terrorism struck downtown Boston, the fate of Tsarnaev reinvigorated the debate over capital punishment. While the bomber received the death penalty in 2015, he appealed the sentence, escalating the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which has now just reimposed it after a six-year legal battle. Tsarnaev will now sit on death row within a highly secure Colorado prison.
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