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The Biden administration will try to persuade the Supreme Court this week to reinstate the death penalty for convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, arguing that a jury need not consider the evidence on which the government itself had relied on an earlier phase of the case.
Tsarnaev’s guilt in the deaths of three people in the bombing near the finish line of the marathon in 2013 is not at issue in the case the judges will hear on Wednesday – just whether he should be sentenced to life or death.
The court is also unlikely to reflect on aggressively pursuing the administration of a death sentence for Tsarnaev even as it halted federal executions and President Joe Biden called for an end to the sentence. federal death.
Instead, the focus will be on evidence that Tsarnaev’s lawyers wanted the jury to hear what supported their argument that his older brother, Tamerlan, was the mastermind of the attack and that the impressionable younger brother was. somehow less responsible. The evidence challenged Tamerlan Tsarnaev in triple murder in Boston suburb of Waltham on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Boston Federal Court of Appeal ruled last year that the trial judge erred in excluding the evidence and overturned Tsarnaev’s death sentence. There is a second question in the case: whether the trial judge did enough to question the jurors about their exposure to widespread media coverage of the bombing.
The Trump administration, which has carried out 13 executions in its past six months, quickly appealed. When the new administration did not indicate any change in point of view, the court agreed to reconsider the case.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers have never disputed that he and his brother set off the two bombs near the marathon finish line on April 15, 2013. Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Chinese student who graduated from Boston University; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford; and Martin Richard, 8, who had gone to the marathon with his family, were killed. More than 260 people were injured.
During a four-day manhunt for suicide bombers, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier was shot dead in his car. Boston Police Officer Dennis Simmonds also died a year after being injured in a clash with suicide bombers.
Police captured a bloodied and injured Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where he was hiding in a boat parked in a backyard, hours after his brother died. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had participated in a shootout with the police and was run over by his brother as he fled.
Tsarnaev, now 28, was convicted of all 30 charges against him, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and the murder of Collier during the escape attempt of the Tsarnaev brothers. The appeals court upheld all but a few of his convictions.
A convicted murderer who pleads with a jury to lock him up for life, rather than vote for his execution, has a wide leeway to present evidence that he believes would make a death sentence less likely.
The 2011 murders, defense lawyers said, went to the heart of their argument that Tsarnaev was deeply influenced and radicalized by his revered brother, who had previously displayed an ability for extreme violence. The younger brother was less responsible for the chaos of the marathon, they said.
“The evidence therefore made it much more likely that Dzhokhar acted under the radicalizing influence of Tamerlane and that Tamerlane directed the bombings,” Ginger Anders, chief attorney at Tsarnaev’s Supreme Court, wrote in a filing. before the High Court.
For its part, the administration maintains that it does not dispute the leadership role of the older brother and that the defense lawyers were able to plead this case. Still, the jury sentenced Tsarnaev to death, wrote Acting Solicitor General Brian Fletcher.
Tsarnaev “made the choice to carry out a terrorist attack against children and other innocent bystanders during the marathon, and the jury held him responsible for that choice,” Fletcher wrote.
The account of Tamerlane’s involvement in the previous murders came from a friend, Ibragim Todashev, that investigators interviewed after the marathon attack. Todashev told authorities that Tamerlane had recruited him to rob the three men, and they tied the men with duct tape before Tamerlane slit their throats to avoid leaving any witnesses.
In a bizarre twist, while Todashev was questioned in Florida, he was shot dead after authorities said he attacked officers. The agent who killed Todashev was cleared of any criminal act.
Dzhokhar also told a college friend that his brother was involved in the Waltham murders and committed “jihad” there, a lawyer representing the friend told prosecutors. No one has ever been charged with the triple murder.
But prosecutors said the evidence linking Tamerlan to the Waltham murders was unreliable, irrelevant to Dzhokhar’s involvement in the marathon attack, and would only confuse jurors. The judge who oversaw the trial agreed.
Yet authorities have previously used Todashev’s statements to request a search warrant for Tamerlane’s car after the bombings for blood, DNA and other evidence relevant to the triple murder.
Anders called the government’s description of the statements as unreliable a “breathtaking turn” after defending their reliability in order to secure a warrant.
The Justice Department said different standards apply and that by asking for a search warrant, federal agents were not saying every word of what Todashev said was true.
A court ruling for Tsarnaev would raise the possibility of a new sentencing trial that would force the victims and their families to relive that horrific time, if the administration wanted to attempt a death sentence again.
Two years after the attack, the parents of the youngest victim wrote an essay printed on the Boston Globe’s front page urging the Justice Department to drop its death penalty prosecution. Denise and Bill Richard wrote that years of appeals that would keep Tsarnaev’s name in the news would force them to relive their ordeal and prevent them from starting to heal.
“As long as the accused is in the spotlight, we have no choice but to experience a story told on his terms, not our own. The minute the accused disappears from our newspapers and our television screens , this is the minute we begin the process of rebuilding our lives and our families, ”they wrote.
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Richer reported from Boston.
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