The Supreme Court has reinstated the death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man behind the 2013 bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
The court ended up ruling 6-3 this week that the capital sentence being tossed in 2020, over jury selection issues and excluded evidence, was the wrong move, per CBS News.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing on behalf of the court’s conservative majority, shared that the initial district court was not in the wrong when it declined to ask about 2013 media consumption while selecting a jury, and that it was “reasonable” for the court to not allow evidence pertaining to his brother Tamerlan.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes,” Thomas wrote for the court. “The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.”
Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, instead shared that the court “acted lawfully’ when it found that evidence pertaining to the older brother’s involvement in three murders on September 11, 2011 should’ve been shared in the case. Tsarnaev’s lawyers have argued that his older brother was the main figure behind the killings, and that Dzhokhar just did as he was advised. Tamerlan ended up dying in a police shooting after the bombings, as Dzhokhar was convicted on 30 counts in 2015.
“I have written elsewhere about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the imposition of the death penalty,” Breyer said. “This case provides just one more example of some of those problems.”
Still, President Joe Biden’s administration has asked the Supreme Court to bring back Tsarnaev’s death sentences, as a response to the bombing that left three dead and others injured, after the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to uphold the 1st Circuit’s 2020 decision, too.
