Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is portrayed in this photograph presented as evidence by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 23, 2015.
U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston | Reuters
The Supreme Court said Monday it will decide whether the death penalty can be reinstated for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of conspiring with his older brother in the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon in which three people were killed. and hundreds injured. .
In an order, the court agreed to hear an appeal filed by the Justice Department for a lower court decision that ended Tsarnaev’s death sentence. The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the trial court judge, U.S. District Court Judge George O’Toole, did not adequately ensure that the jurors were impartial in the case. high profile.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers argued in court papers that judges should not consider the Justice Department’s appeal. They wrote that even if the court sided with the Justice Department in the case, it is likely that the 1st Circuit would continue to sentence the death penalty for other reasons related to the jury’s misconduct.
Tsarnaev, 27, received 20 life sentences in addition to the death penalty, and will remain in prison for the rest of his life regardless of Supreme Court action.
The case was appealed by the Justice Department in October, while former President Donald Trump was still in office. It will test President Joe Biden’s commitment to ending the federal death penalty, which Trump resumed after a hiatus of nearly two decades.
Civil rights groups have pushed Biden to order Justice Department prosecutors to stop asking for the sentence. Biden campaigned to work with Congress to eliminate death sentences at the federal level and to encourage states to do the same.
The court is likely to hear the case in its terms starting next fall, with a decision scheduled for the summer of 2022.
The White House and a Tsarnaev lawyer did not immediately return requests for comment.
The central dispute in the case is over whether the jurors in Tsarnaev’s case were properly examined in order to eliminate the potential bias resulting from the extensive media coverage of the bombing.
While the court asked jurors how much they had read about the case, O’Toole rejected requests from Tsarnaev’s lawyers to ask more specific questions to potential jurors about the coverage they had seen and their impressions of the event.
Circuit Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson, in her July 2020 appeals court ruling, wrote that the lower court’s decision robbed Tsarnaev of the chance to receive a fair trial, citing questions from jurors and the jury. decision to exclude evidence that Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. , influenced Dzhokhar.
“A basic promise of our criminal justice system is that even the worst of us deserve to be tried and punished legally,” Thompson wrote to the court.
Thompson ordered the district court to convene a new jury and hold a new trial “strictly limited to the sentence Dzhokhar should receive in the positions eligible for death.”
The Justice Department urged judges to review this decision. Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Wall wrote in a writ that deleting a “nationally significant” death sentence on the basis of a specific rule of the circuit weighs heavily in favor of this court’s intervention. “
“In view of the importance of this case to the nation, the review of the appeal should include the nation’s highest court,” Wall wrote.
He added that if the court does not reverse the decision of the 1st Circuit, the US would be forced to “abandon the pursuit of the death penalty in this case” or conduct another trial, which would require the victims of the bombing “to revive their disturbing experiences “. “
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with police days after the bombing. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is in prison in Florence, Colorado.