The death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been reinstated.
In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court reversed a ruling that voided the death penalty.
NEW: The Supreme Court has reinstated the death penalty for Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the convicted Boston Marathon bomber.
— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) March 4, 2022
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court's liberal justices in dissent.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.”
In July, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit sided with Tsarnaev’s lawyers who argued the judge that oversaw his trial in 2015 did not thoroughly question potential jurors for bias, as The Washington Post noted.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, “I have written elsewhere about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the imposition of the death penalty … This case provides just one more example of some of those problems.”
After the Supreme Court agreed to review a death penalty case involving Tsarnaev, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in April of 2021 the president “made clear, as he did on the campaign trail, that he has grave concerns about whether capital punishment, as currently implemented, is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness.”
In June of 2021, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty for Tsarnaev.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said, “Prior to the Trump administration, from 2003 until July 2020, not a single execution was carried out by the Department of Justice.”
He added, “The President believes the Department should return to its prior practice, and not carry out executions.”
On April 15, 2013, Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line of the marathon.
In 2015, Tsarnaev was founded guilty of all 30 counts he was charged with. Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, and eight-year-old Martin Richard died in the bombing, as Reuters reported.
