Attorney General William Barr on Thursday said the Justice Department will try to impose a death sentence on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man convicted of carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, following a ruling by the court last month that sentenced Tsarnaev to death.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said the DOJ intends to appeal the ruling of the 1st US Circuit Court in July which ordered a new trial to determine whether Tsarnaev should be executed for the attack that three people killed and more than 260 others injured.
Attorney General William Barr spoke to the media during a news conference on Operation Legend, a federal task force set up to combat violent crime in several cities, on Wednesday, August 19, 2020, in Kansas City, Mo.
(AP)
“We will do what is necessary,” Barr said. “We will take it to the Supreme Court and we will continue to prosecute the death penalty.”
A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court found that the judge who oversaw the 2015 trial did not adequately ask potential jurors what they read or heard about the highly publicized case.
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The defense acknowledged that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, carried out the attack on April 15, 2013, but tried to portray his brother as the radicalized mastermind who they said lured his impressionable younger brother into violence.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died after a gunfight with police and was overpowered by his brother when he fled. Police arrested a wounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hours later in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where he was hiding in a boat parked in a backyard.
Attorney General William Barr says the Department of Justice will try to reinstate the death sentence of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
(FBI via AP)
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Tsarnaev, now 27, was convicted of all 30 charges against him, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and the murder of an MIT police officer in the attempted getaway of the Tsarnaev brothers. The Court of Appeal upheld all but a few of its convictions.
Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China, killed in the bombings; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford; and 8-year-old Martin Richard, who had gone to the marathon with his family. MIT police officer Sean Collier was shot dead days later in his cruiser.
The media attention described the case as “unrivaled in U.S. legal history,” the appellate court said U.S. District Judge George O’Toole fell short in conducting a jury selection process “enough to identify prejudice.”
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The 1st Circuit Court found that O’Toole had failed to refuse to let the defense tell jurors about evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was involved in the 2011 murder of three people in the Boston suburb of Waltham.
“If the judge had allowed the Waltham evidence – evidence that shows (like no one else) that Tamerlan was predisposed to religiously-inspired brutality before the bombings and to the radicalization of Dzhokhar – the defense could have reiterated the government’s assertion. that the brothers have a ‘partnership of equals’, “Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote in the ruling.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
