WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice will try to reinstate a death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man convicted of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Attorney General William Barr said Thursday.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said the Department of Justice would appeal the court’s ruling last month that overturned Tsarnaev’s death sentence and instituted a trial to determine whether he should be executed for the attack. ‘ t killed three people and injured more than 260 others. Barr said the Justice Department would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“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.”
Under Barr, the justice department has resumed conducting federal executions, killing three men so far and next week and in September at least three other plans, despite the coronavirus pandemic and public support for the death penalty. Barr has said that it is the duty of the judiciary to carry out the sentences imposed by the courts – including the death penalty – and to provide justice for the families of the victims.
A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court found in July that the judge who reviewed the 2015 trial did not adequately ask potential jurors what they read or heard about the highly publicized case.
The 1st Circuit decision has ripped old wounds in Boston, with many injured in the attack expressing anger and fear at the prospect of reliving their trauma at a second trial.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling of Massachusetts said Thursday that prosecutors are hoping for a favorable verdict at the nation’s highest court so they can avoid another lawsuit. Lelling said he respects the voices of those seeking a call to leave their pursuit of the death penalty, but said Tsarnaev’s crimes “place him in that narrow category of criminals for whom death is a proportionate punishment” . “
“Some have argued that carrying out Tsarnaev will not deter others from committing similar crimes. But, ultimately, this decision is not about downsizing, ”Lelling said in an email. “It’s about justice.”
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 bloody and injured Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hours later in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where he was hiding in a boat, parked in a backyard.
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.
A lawyer for Tsarnaev, David Patton, declined to comment Thursday. Patton said after the 1st Circuit decision that “it is now up to the government to decide whether the victims and Boston should be placed through a second trial, or allow close to this horrific tragedy by allowing a life sentence without the possibility of release. “
Prosecutors told jurors that Tsarnaev was just as punishable in the attack they say was intended to punish the US for its wars in Muslim countries. In the boat where he was found hiding, he wrote, “Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
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. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 came short in conducting a jury selection process “enough to identify prejudice.”
The 1st Circuit also found that O’Toole had wrongly refused 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 strongly refuted the government’s assertion that the brothers have a “partnership of equality,” Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote in the ruling.
President Donald Trump tweeted after the decision that the federal government “should seek the Death Penalty again in a do-over of that chapter of the original trial.” The ruling came as the U.S. government recently reimbursed with federal executions after a 17-year hiatus.
