Washington – The Supreme Court said on Monday it would start the legal battle over the fate of the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose death sentences were overturned by a lower court last year over issues with the jurors’ exposure to the media before of the trial.
The Department of Justice asked the high court in October to review the decision of a panel of three judges from the U.S. Circuit’s 1st Court of Appeals, urging judges not to allow the lower court to “give the last word” due to ” profound interests of the erroneous “decision to reject Tsarnaev’s death penalty.
The Supreme Court, the Justice Department said, should “put this historic case back on track towards its fair conclusion” and reinstate his death sentence. The court is expected to hear the case’s arguments in his next term, which begins in October.
The then attorney general William Barr told the Associated Press in an interview after the lower court’s decision that the Justice Department would continue to pursue the death penalty for Tsarnaev. But it is not clear whether that remains the position of President Biden’s Department of Justice, which opposes the death penalty.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated on Monday that Biden “has serious concerns about whether the death penalty, as currently implemented, is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of fairness and impartiality.” But she said there were no updates to the government’s death penalty policy and referred questions about the dispute to the Department of Justice. The department declined to comment on Tsarnaev’s case.
Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which left three dead and many injured. Tsarnaev’s lawyers admitted that he and his older brother Tamerlan detonated the two homemade bombs near the finish line of the race, but said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the mastermind of the attack.
The brothers tried to flee the state after the bombing, leading to a multi-day manhunt that left Boston and its surrounding areas confined. Tsarnaev, now 27, ended up being arrested by the police after he was discovered hiding in a boat behind a house in Watertown, Massachusetts, while Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police while pursuing the brothers.
A federal grand jury indicted Tsarnaev on 30 counts, including three counts of using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death, and he was convicted of all crimes for perpetrating the terrorist attack. The jury recommended and the district court imposed the death penalty on six of the 17 capital charges.
Tsarnaev appealed, and the 1st Circuit maintained almost all of his beliefs, with the exception of three. But the appeals court also rejected his capital sentences and ordered a new conviction.
The Boston court found that the district judge overseeing Tsarnaev’s trial abused his discretion by rejecting requests to ask potential jurors specific questions about pre-trial media coverage that he may have seen or read about the case. The 1st Circuit also concluded that the district court made a mistake during the penalty phase of the trial, excluding evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was allegedly involved in murders that took place two years before the attack, which would have reinforced the central theory of Tsarnaev’s lawyers under which he acted upon his brother’s influence.
The Trump administration’s decision to pursue the search for capital punishment in Tsarnaev’s case was not entirely surprising. In the summer of 2019, Barr announced his intention to resume executions after a break of nearly two decades in executing executions at the federal level.
In total, the Trump administration executed 13 death sentences, six of which occurred after Biden won the presidential election in November and before he was sworn in on January 20.
In urging the Supreme Court to accept its appeal last year, the Justice Department argued that the First Circuit “wrongly vacated” Tsarnaev’s death sentences “in one of the most important terrorism cases in our country’s history” and warned that a new conviction process would impose significant burdens on the victims of the 2013 attack.
“To reinstate the sentences that the jury and the district court deemed appropriate for the defendant’s heinous acts, the government will have to repeat the penalty phase of the case; the court will have to carry out (and potential jurors will have to submit) to voir dire that presumably will be much longer and more costly than the original 21-day lawsuit; and victims will once again have to speak out to describe the horrors the defendant has inflicted on them, “said then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Wall to court in a filing.
But Tsarnaev’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court not to hear the dispute, arguing that the government would not benefit from reversing the lower court’s decision.