Washington – The Supreme Court said Monday it would take the legal battle for the fate of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose death sentences were overturned by a lower court last year over issues related to exposure to preventive media of jurors.
The Justice Department asked the high court in October to review the ruling of a three-judge U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court, urging judges not to allow the lower court “Have the last word” given the “deep involvement of the erroneous” sentence that expels Tsarnaev’s major convictions.
The Supreme Court, according to the Justice Department, should “re-launch this flagship case towards its fair conclusion” and reinstate his death penalty. The court is expected to hear arguments from the case in its next term, which begins in October.
Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press in an interview after the lower court ruling that the Justice Department would continue to pursue the death penalty for Tsarnaev. But it is unclear whether this remains the position of President Biden’s Justice Department, which opposes the death penalty.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated Monday that Mr Biden “has serious concerns about whether the death penalty currently applied is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness.” . But he said there are no updates to the administration’s death penalty policy and referred questions about the dispute to the Justice Department. The department declined to comment on Tsarnaev’s case.
Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 of his role in the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, which caused three deaths and about twenty more injuries. Tsarnaev’s lawyers acknowledged that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, detonated the two homemade bombs near the finish line of the race, but said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the mastermind of the attack.
The brothers attempted to flee the state after the bombing, prompting a hunt for a few days that left Boston and its environs closed. Tsarnaev, now 27, was eventually arrested by police after he was discovered hiding in a boat behind a house in Watertown, Massachusetts, while Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a shootout with officers while chasing the brothers.
A grand federal jury charged Tsarnaev with 30 counts, including three cases of using a weapon of mass destruction that caused death, and was convicted of all crimes for perpetrating the terrorist attack. The jury recommended and the district court imposed the death penalty on six of 17 capital charges.
Tsarnaev appealed and the first circuit upheld almost all but three of his convictions. But the appellate court also dismissed his major convictions and ordered a new sentencing procedure.
The Boston-based court found that the district judge overseeing Tsarnaev’s trial abused his discretion in rejecting requests to ask specific questions to potential jurors about the preventive media coverage he has seen or read about the case. The first circuit also found that the district court made a mistake during the trial penalty phase excluding evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was allegedly involved in murders two years before the bombing, which would have reinforced the central theory of the lawyers of Tsarnaev according to which the influence of his brother acted.
The Trump administration’s decision to pursue the death penalty in Tsarnaev’s case was not entirely surprising. In the summer of 2019, Barr announced his intention to resume executions after a nearly two-decade hiatus in federal executions.
In all, the Trump administration carried out the executions of 13 inmates sentenced to death, six of whom took place after Biden won the presidential election in November and before he was sworn in on January 20.
In urging the Supreme Court to appeal its appeal last year, the Justice Department argued that the first circuit “unduly overturned” Tsarnaev’s death sentences in one of the most important terrorist trials in the history of the Tsarnaev. our nation and warned that a new sentencing procedure would impose burdens on the victims of the 2013 attack.
“In order to reinstate the judgments that the jury and the district court considered appropriate for the heinous acts of the defendant, the government will have to retry the penalty phase of the case; the court will have to carry out to submit) presumably, this will be much longer and heavier than the original 21-day procedure, and victims will have to take a stand again to describe the horrors the respondent caused them, “he told the court in at that time Attorney General Jeffrey Wall. a presentation.
But Tsarnaev’s lawyers had asked the Supreme Court not to hear the dispute, arguing that the government would not benefit from a reversal of the lower court’s decision.