From Reuters:
“Biden administration pushes
for Boston Marathon bomber death sentence”
The U.S. Justice Department has
urged the Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,
convicted in the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, despite President Joe
Biden’s stated opposition to capital punishment. The department in a 48-page
brief filed late on Monday argued that a lower court wrongly overturned
Tsarnaev's death sentence and ordered a new trial to determine what sentence he
deserved for carrying out with his older brother the attack that killed three
people and wounded more than 260 others.
The filing marked the latest
deviation between the policy views of Biden, a Democrat who has said he wants
to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and the Justice
Department, whose independence he has vowed to promote. "The jury
carefully considered each of respondent's crimes and determined that capital
punishment was warranted for the horrors that he personally inflicted,"
Acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said in the Justice Department's
brief.m White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said the Justice Department
"has independence regarding such decisions," but added that Biden
believes the federal government should not carry out executions. "President
Biden has made clear that he has deep concerns about whether capital punishment
is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and
fairness," Bates added.
In overturning Tsarnaev's death
sentence, the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in July 2020 ruled
that the trial judge "fell short" in screening jurors for potential
bias following pervasive news coverage of the bombing. It ordered a new trial
over the sentence he should receive for the death penalty-eligible crimes for
which he was convicted. Tsarnaev is a Kyrgyzstan-born U.S. citizen. David
Patton, Tsarnaev's lawyer, has argued that the U.S. government should allow his
client to serve life in prison. Patton did not respond to a request for
comment. The Justice Department under Republican former President Donald Trump
initiated the government’s appeal of the 1st Circuit ruling, and the Supreme
Court in March agreed to take up the case. It will hear arguments and issue a
ruling in its next term, which starts in October and ends in June 2022.
Tsarnaev, now 27, and his
brother, Tamerlan, precipitated five days of panic in Boston when they
detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon's finish line on
April 15, 2013 - tearing through the packed crowd and causing many people to
lose legs - and then tried to flee the city. In the following days, they also
killed a police officer, Sean Collier. Tsarnaev's brother died after a gunfight
with police. Jurors in 2015 found Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 counts he faced and
later determined he deserved execution for a bomb he planted that killed Martin
Richard, 8, and Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 23. Restaurant manager
Krystle Campbell, 29, was also killed.
^ This is a step in the right
direction for Biden. Tsarnaev needs to be put to death for his terrorism. ^
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