Supreme Court reinstates death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Suspect 2 in the Boston Marathon bombing investigation. (FBI/Released)
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The United States Supreme Court has reinstated the death penalty for the Boston Marathon bomber, whose attack in 2013 left three dead and hundreds of other injured.
Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the court’s opinion on Friday.
“On April 15, 2013, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted and detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The blasts hurled nails and metal debris into the assembled crowd, killing three while maiming and wounding hundreds,” the court stated. “Three days later, the brothers murdered a campus police officer, carjacked a graduate student, and fired on police who had located them in the stolen vehicle. Dzhokhar attempted to flee in the vehicle but inadvertently killed Tamerlan by running him over.”
“Dzhokhar was soon arrested and indicted. A jury found Dzhokhar guilty of 30 federal crimes and recommended the death penalty for 6 of them. The District Court accordingly sentenced Dzhokhar to death. The Court of Appeals vacated the death sentence. We now reverse,” it continued.
The Department of Justice previously asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty, arguing that the bomber not only killed multiple innocent people, but consigned “several others to a ‘lifetime of unimaginable suffering.’”
“The jury carefully considered each of the respondent’s crime and determined that capital punishment was warranted for the horrors that he personally inflicted — setting down a shrapnel bomb in a crowd and detonating it, killing a child and a promising young student, and consigning several others to a ‘lifetime of unimaginable suffering,’” Justice Department attorneys wrote, according to The New York Post.
