WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday reinstated the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of helping to carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the three Liberal members of the court disagreeing.
The bombings near the finish of the marathon killed three people and injured 260, many of them seriously. Seventeen people lost limbs. A law enforcement officer was killed as the brothers fled a few days later. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s older brother and accomplice, died after a shootout with police.
A panel of three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, upheld Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s 2020 convictions on 27 counts. But the appeals court ruled that his death sentence had to be reversed because the trial judge had not questioned the jurors closely enough about their exposure to publicity prior to the trial and excluded evidence related to Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
After the appeals court ruling, federal government attorneys during the Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to hear the case. After the judges agreed to review it, the Biden administration continued the case, United States v. Tsarnaev, No. 20-443, although President Biden has said he will work to abolish federal executions and the Department of Justice under his administration put a moratorium on the execution of the federal death penalty.
Until July 2020, there had been no federal executions in 17 years. In the six months that followed, the Trump administration executed 13 inmates, more than three times as many as the federal government had executed in the previous six decades.
There was no discussion of Mr. Tsarnaev, Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote to the appeals court. But, she added, “a core promise of our criminal justice system is that even the worst of us deserve to be tried fairly and punished legally.”
“To be clear,” Judge Thompson wrote, “Dzhokhar will remain in prison for the rest of his life, with the only question being whether the government will end his life by executing him.”
Judge Thompson wrote that the trial judge should not have ruled out evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been involved in a triple murder in 2011, which could have bolstered an argument by defense attorneys that he had dominated and intimidated his younger brother.
In a 2013 FBI interview, Ibragim Todashev, a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, admitted that he had participated with him in the 2011 robbery of three drug dealers in Waltham, Massachusetts, but he added that only Tamerlan Tsarnaev had the throat of the victims had cut. When Mr. Todashev started writing down his confession, he suddenly attacked the officers, who shot and killed him.