Supreme Court reimposes death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

The death sentence for the Boston Marathon bomber has been restored by the Supreme Court.

The justices agreed with the Biden administration that a federal appeals court was wrong to throw out the sentence a jury imposed on the Boston Marathon bomber.

In 2020, the First US. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the trial judge was wrong to exclude evidence that could have shown that Tamerlan was less responsible for the carnage than his brother. The judge was faulted by the appeals court for not questioning the jurors about their exposure to the bombing.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. He was guaranteed a fair trial by the Sixth Amendment. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, made up of the court's six conservative justices.

In his dissent for the court's three liberal justices, Justice Stephen Breyer said that the Court of Appeals acted "lawfully" in holding that the District Court should have allowed Dzhokhar to introduce this evidence.

The court has been asked to reconsider capital punishment.

I have written about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the death penalty. He wrote that this case provided one more example of some of the problems.

Lingzi Lu, a Boston University graduate student from China, Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Massachusetts, and Martin Richard, an 8-year-old from Boston, were all killed in the Boston Marathon bombing.