Despite the fact that he and his brother caused a “battlefield-like carnage” when they bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence must be vacated pending a new trial in the criminalization phase a federal appeals court said Friday.
The ruling came from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
“A central promise of our criminal justice system is that even the worst of us deserves to be fairly tried and legally punished,” Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote for the court. The ruling found that the judge who presided over Tsarnaev’s trial in 2015 “did not meet the” standard of justice.
The 224-page ruling ordered a “new trial strictly limited to the sentence Dzhokhar should receive on the charges eligible for death.”
A spokeswoman for US Attorney Andrew E. Lelling’s office said Friday afternoon that prosecutors were still reviewing the ruling and would have more to say in the coming weeks. Two of Tsarnaev’s appeals attorneys did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
The judges said in the ruling, “only to be crystal clear … Dzhokhar will remain confined in prison for the rest of his life, and the only question that remains is whether the government will end his life by executing him.”
Thompson was joined on the three-judge panel by judges Juan R. Torruella and William J. Kayatta Jr.
This is a breaking news item to be updated.
Travis Andersen can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @TAGlobe.
