The Department of Justice will try to reintroduce the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Attorney General William Barr
Bill BarrEx FBI Attorney Clinesmith pleads guilty to forgery of document in Trump Russia’s probe The Hill’s 12:30 Report: Delegates stage-centric videos for the roll call Watch live: Barr press conference on Operation Legend MORE said Thursday.
The attorney general said The Associated Press in an interview that the Justice Department will issue an appeals court ruling from last month that the death penalty reversed for Tsarnaev.
Barr said the department would take the death penalty argument to the Supreme Court for the man convicted in the attack that killed three people and injured more than 260 others.
“We will do what is necessary,” Barr said, according to the AP. “We will take it to the Supreme Court and we will continue to prosecute the death penalty.”
Barr’s remarks come after an appeals court ruled that U.S. district court jurors did not adequately feed bias into what they read or saw about the case. The court had convicted Tsarnaev of all 30 prosecutors, and the appeals court upheld most of the convictions.
Tsarnaev’s legal team acknowledged that he and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had initiated the bombings, but claimed that their client had been radicalized by his brother. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after being overpowered by his brother while trying to escape and fight a gun with police.
But prosecutors have argued that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev also wanted revenge on the US for its wars in predominantly Muslim countries and wrote in the boat in which he was caught to “stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
A lawyer for Tsarnaev, David Patton, declined to comment on the case when contacted by The Hill.
Following the decision of the higher appeal, Patton said, “it is now up to the government to determine whether the victims and Boston should be placed through a second trial, or to allow closure to this horrific tragedy by allowing a life sentence without the possibility of release, ”according to the AP.
President Trump
Donald John TrumpThe Memo: Obama goes into battle, impoverishes Trump Harris’ duty to fight for the country’s ideals in accepting VP nomination. Pelosi paints Trump and McConnell as twin barriers to more progress tweeted that the government “should seek the death penalty anew in doing that chapter of the original trial” after the appeals court handed down the death sentence last month.
The Department of Justice resumed federal executions in recent weeks following a 17-year suspension that resulted in three men being prosecuted last month. Three others have planned executions next week as in September.
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