In a 6-3 ruling on Friday, the court found that a federal appeals court was wrong to vacate the death sentence based on issues of jury selection and evidence.
The vote was divided along lines of ideology, with outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Elena Kagan, and, in part, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting with the ruling.
Three people were killed and 260 were injured, many seriously, in the 2013 bombing. Seventeen of those who were injured lost limbs. A police officer was killed during the ensuing manhunt.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one,” conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority.
The court was looking at a ruling by a panel of three judges in the US Court of Appeals for the first Circuit. The panel agreed with Tsarnaev’s attorneys back in July that potential jurors were not properly questioned for bias in the heavily publicised 2015 trial.
The panel overturned Tsarnaev’s death sentence, saying that some evidence had also been improperly withheld. The evidence could have shown that Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan, was more responsible for the attack.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a confrontation with law enforcement as police closed in on the brothers in the days following the bombing in April 2013.
The panel of judges upheld Tsarnaev’s conviction on 27 charges; his guilt was never questioned. The issue at hand was whether he was to face the death penalty or life in prison.
The three people who died in the bombing were Chinese graduate student Lingzi Lu, restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, and 8-year-old Martin Richard.
The case created an issue for the Department of Justice. The agency had asked the Supreme Court to reverse the federal appeals court’s decision despite President Joe Biden, who opposes the death penalty, having stopped federal executions.
Judge Rogeriee Thompson wrote for the panel that while Tsarnaev’s guilt wasn’t in question, “a core promise of our criminal justice system is that even the very worst among us deserves to be fairly tried and lawfully punished”.
“Just to be crystal clear, Dzhokhar will remain confined to prison for the rest of his life, with the only question remaining being whether the government will end his life by executing him,” she added.
She wrote that the judge in Tsarnaev’s trial shouldn’t have excluded evidence that Tamerlan had been a part of a 2011 triple murder. This could have boosted arguments that he scared and pushed his brother into taking part in the bombing.
A friend of Tamerlan said in a 2013 interview with the FBI that he had taken part in a robbery of three drug dealers alongside Tamerlan in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2011. He said Tamerlan was the one who cut their throats.
The friend, Ibragim Todashev, was shot and killed by agents after suddenly attacking them after having started to write down his confession.
“No one alleges that Dzhokhar participated in the Waltham murders, and, as the District Court reasonably concluded, the evidence available sheds little light on what role (if any) Tamerlan actually played,” Justice Thomas wrote. “To make his point at sentencing, then, Dzhokhar would first have to show, without any surviving witnesses, what role Tamerlan actually played. Then, he would have to establish that he learned of the Waltham crimes before planning the bombings.”
“Finally, he would have to explain how his knowledge of Tamerlan’s role in a nearly two-year-old violent robbery affected his own role in the bombings,” he added. “Whatever other courts might think about an inquiry into a defendant’s own prior bad acts, this district court reasonably thought that the Waltham murder inquiry risked confusing the jury in these proceedings. We see no basis to disturb that conclusion.”
Supreme Court reimposes Boston Marathon bomber's death sentence
The Supreme Court has reinstated the death sentence for convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The justices, by a 6-3 vote Friday, agreed with the Biden administration's arguments that a federal appeals court was wrong to throw out the sentence of death a jury imposed on Tsarnaev for his role in the bombing that killed three people near the finish line of the marathon in 2013.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, made up of the court’s six conservative justices.
The court reversed the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which ruled in 2020 that the trial judge improperly excluded evidence that could have shown Tsarnaev was deeply influenced by his older brother, Tamerlan, and was somehow less responsible for the carnage. The appeals court also faulted the judge for not sufficiently questioning jurors about their exposure to extensive news coverage of the bombing.
In dissent for the court's three liberal justices, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, “In my view, the Court of Appeals acted lawfully in holding that the District Court should have allowed Dzhokhar to introduce this evidence.”
Breyer has called on the court to reconsider capital punishment. “I have written elsewhere about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the imposition of the death penalty ... This case provides just one more example of some of those problems,” he wrote in a section of his dissent his liberal colleagues, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, did not join.
The prospect that Tsarnaev, now 28, will be executed anytime soon is remote. The Justice Department halted federal executions last summer after the Trump administration carried out 13 executions in its final six months.
President Joe Biden has said he opposes the death penalty, but his administration was put in the position of defending Tsarnaev’s sentence at the Supreme Court.
Had Tsarnaev prevailed at the high court, the administration would have had to decide whether to pursue a new death sentence or allow Tsarnaev to serve out the rest of his life in prison.
Tsarnaev’s guilt in the deaths of Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford, Massachusetts; and 8-year-old Martin Richard, of Boston, was not at issue, only whether he should be put to death or imprisoned for life.
Tsarnaev was convicted of all 30 charges against him, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and the killing of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Officer Sean Collier during the Tsarnaev brothers’ getaway attempt. The appeals court upheld all but a few of his convictions.
Two people who were seriously injured in the bombing and its aftermath praised Friday's outcome on Twitter.
“Congratulations to all who worked tirelessly for justice,” wrote Adrianne Haslet, a professional ballroom dancer who lost a leg in the attacks.
Dic Donohue, a Massachusetts transit police officer who was critically wounded in a firefight with the two marathon bombers, tweeted: “Bottom line: He can’t kill anyone else.”
Others disagreed. Melida Arredondo sustained hearing damage from the explosions on Boylston Street, and suffers from PTSD following the events of the attack. Her husband, Carlos Arredondo, helped save many victims.
She opposes the death penalty, due to her Catholicism, but also because of what’s happening now — attention on Tsarnaev with every twist and turn in the legal case.
“It’s bothersome every time this comes back to light and he’s in the spotlight …. If he would just be life in prison he would not be able to make any appeals anymore. That stops it. And I think that’s preferable for many, not all, of the people who were involved that day.”
Rachael Rollins, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said more legal battles lie ahead.
"Today’s opinion by the Supreme Court reverses the decision vacating the death sentence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev following the jury’s verdict," she said. "There remain, however, other legal issues that must be addressed by various courts. Legal rulings don’t erase trauma and pain. Our focus today, and always, is on the hundreds of families that were deeply impacted and traumatized by this horrific act of domestic terrorism."
What happens next lies with Rollins and her boss, Attorney General Merrick Garland, according to former federal judge Nancy Gertner. They could decide to reach a plea deal with Tsarnaev where they drop the death penalty and he spends the rest of his life in prison.
"Maybe now the US Attorney and the Attorney General should say life imprisonment and this case being over is sufficient,” Gertner said.
The main focus at high court arguments in October was on evidence that implicated Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a triple killing in the Boston suburb of Waltham on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The evidence bolstered the defense team theory that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was indoctrinated and radicalized by his older brother.
The trial judge had rejected that argument, ruling that the evidence linking Tamerlan to the Waltham killings was unreliable and irrelevant to Dzhokhar’s participation in the marathon attack. The judge also said the defense team's argument would only confuse jurors.
One problem with the evidence about the Waltham killings was that both Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Ibragim Todashev, who implicated him, were dead by the time of the trial.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had been in a gunfight with police and was run over by his brother as he fled, hours before police captured a bloodied and wounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston suburb of Watertown.
Todashev was interviewed by investigators after the marathon attack. He told authorities that Tamerlan recruited him to rob the three men, and they bound the men with duct tape before Tamerlan slashed their throats to avoid leaving any witnesses.
In a bizarre twist, while Todashev was being questioned in Florida, he was shot dead after authorities say he attacked the agents. The agent who killed Todashev was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing.
Given the circumstances, Thomas wrote, U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. can't be faulted for excluding Todashev's account because “no matter how Dzhokhar presented the evidence, its bare inclusion risked producing a confusing mini-trial where the only witnesses who knew the truth were dead.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh also voted to reimpose Tsarnaev's death sentence.
Source:
wbur.org, Mark Sherman, The Associated Press and Ally Jarmanning, WBUR, March 4, 2022
Supreme Court reinstates death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
The Supreme Court on Friday reinstated the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 attack that killed three people and left hundreds injured.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the liberal justices in dissent. Tsarnaev’s guilt was not at issue, but the court’s decision reversed an appeals court ruling that jury deliberations about whether Tsarnaev deserved death or life in prison were tainted by some of the presiding judge’s decisions.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said the process was fair.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes,” Thomas wrote, joined by fellow conservatives. “The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.”
The decision will not change Tsarnaev’s status, at least in the short term. Even though his administration inherited the case and urged the Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court, President Biden opposes capital punishment and Attorney General Merrick Garland has imposed a moratorium on the federal death penalty to study it further.
Biden “expressed horror at the events of the Boston Marathon bombing at the time,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said after the court ruling. “He believes that Tsarnaev should be punished for responsibility in the murder of three innocent people at the marathon, for wounding dozens of others … he knows the deep pain that his crime caused.”
But she also said Biden “has expressed before that he has deep concerns about whether capital punishment is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness.”
Rachael Rollins, the U.S. attorney in Boston, said other legal issues “must be addressed by various courts” in Tsarnaev’s case. “Legal rulings don’t erase trauma and pain,” she said in a statement. “Our focus today, and always, is on the hundreds of families that were deeply impacted and traumatized by this horrific act of domestic terrorism.”
Tsarnaev did not contest his guilt at trial, and the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld his conviction on 27 charges. That included charges in the deaths of a graduate student from China, Lingzi Lu, a restaurant manager named Krystle Campbell, and 8-year-old Martin Richard of Boston.
More than 260 people were wounded — some grievously — by the bombs the 19-year-old Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan placed at the April 2013 running of the Boston Marathon. The brothers also killed Sean Collier, a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while they were on the run. Tamerlan was killed days later after a violent confrontation with police in Watertown.
But last July, the appeals court judges agreed with Tsarnaev’s lawyers that the judge overseeing his 2015 trial did not adequately question potential jurors for bias in the case, which received massive publicity.
In overturning Tsarnaev’s death sentence, the panel also said some evidence was improperly withheld that might have indicated Tamerlan was domineering and had radicalized his younger brother.
But Thomas said the 1st Circuit was wrong in second-guessing U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr.'s handling of the trial.
Based on O’Toole’s years of trial experience, Thomas wrote, he concluded “that jurors who came in with some prior knowledge would still be able to act impartially. … The District Court’s decision was reasonable and well within its discretion, as our precedents make clear.”
The second issue was O’Toole’s decision not to let Tsarnaev’s lawyers introduce the older brother’s alleged role in a triple murder that was unrelated to the bombing. They said that would have shown how dangerous Tamerlan was and would show him to be the ringleader.
But those murders were never solved, and Thomas said the unrelated crime would simply have been confusing to the jury. “Nor was there any way to confirm or verify the relevant facts, since all of the parties involved were dead,” Thomas wrote.
He was joined in his opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer addressed only one part of Tsarnaev’s case — the claim that Tamerlan “took the leading role and induced Dzhokhar’s participation in the bombings.”
At the penalty phase of the trial, “if courts admit evidence of past criminal behavior, unrelated to the crime at issue, to show aggravating circumstances, why should they not do the same to show mitigating circumstances?” Breyer wrote.
Information that Tamerlan took part in “ideologically motivated murders in 2011 supports the claim that Tamerlan was the violent, radicalizing force behind the ideologically motivated bombings a year and a half later,” Breyer wrote. He added that “it would have taken only one juror’s change of mind to have produced a sentence other than death, even if a severe one.”
Breyer’s dissent was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. But neither joined a part of the opinion in which Breyer again expressed his doubts about capital punishment.
“I have written elsewhere about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the imposition of the death penalty,” Breyer wrote. “This case provides just one more example of some of those problems.”
The crimes rocked the Boston area, and the 1st Circuit’s opinion last summer reignited those feelings.
Dic Donohue, a law enforcement officer who was wounded in pursuit of the Tsarnaevs, tweeted after the Supreme Court’s decision was announced that “the back and forth never ends. Bottom line: he can’t kill anyone else.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) called the decision “deeply disappointing.” She has filed legislation to end the federal death penalty.
“State-sanctioned murder is not justice, no matter how heinous the crime,” she said in a statement. “I remain committed to accountability and healing for everyone impacted by the Boston Marathon bombing and I pray for those who are forced to re-live their trauma each time we are reminded of that devastating day.”
The case is U.S. v. Tsarnaev.
Supreme Court Restores Death Sentence for Boston Marathon Bomber
The Biden administration, which announced a moratorium on federal executions, has pursued the case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped carry out the 2013 bombings.
The Supreme Court on Friday reinstated the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of helping carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three and injured hundreds more.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The majority sided with the Biden administration in ruling that a federal appeals court had erred in overturning the death sentence a jury had handed down for Mr. Tsarnaev’s role in the bombings.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. “The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.”
Friday’s ruling cleared the way for Mr. Tsarnaev’s execution, but that is unlikely to happen in the near future in light of a moratorium the Biden administration has imposed on carrying out the federal death penalty.
The bombings, near the finish line of the marathon, transformed a beloved tradition into bloody carnage. The attack left 260 injured, many of them grievously. Seventeen people lost limbs.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan, Justice Thomas wrote, “each brought a backpack containing a homemade pressure-cooker bomb packed with explosives inside a layer of nails, BBs and other metal scraps.”
“Each detonation sent fire and shrapnel in all directions,” Justice Thomas wrote. “The blast from Tamerlan’s bomb shattered Krystle Campbell’s left femur and mutilated her legs. Though bystanders tried to save her, she bled to death on the sidewalk.”
“Dzhokhar’s bomb ripped open the legs of Boston University student Lingzi Lu,” he wrote. “Rescuers tried to stem the bleeding by using a belt as a makeshift tourniquet. She too bled to death.”
A law enforcement officer was killed as the brothers fled a few days later. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a shootout with the police during which he was run over by his brother, who was driving a stolen vehicle.
A 3-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, upheld Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s convictions in 2020 on 27 counts. But the appeals court ruled that his death sentence should be overturned because the trial judge had not questioned jurors closely enough about their exposure to pretrial publicity and had excluded evidence concerning Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Justice Thomas wrote that the appeals court was wrong on both points.
Judge George A. O’Toole Jr., who presided over the trial, had conducted a detailed and thorough questioning of 256 prospective jurors over three weeks, Justice Thomas wrote, after culling an initial pool of 1,373 jurors using a 100-question form.
Mr. Tsarnaev’s lawyers had asked that jurors be required to detail what they had heard and read in news reports about the bombing. Judge O’Toole rejected the request, calling it unfocused and unmanageable, a ruling that Justice Thomas wrote was “reasonable and well within his discretion.”
“In sum,” Justice Thomas wrote, “the court’s jury selection process was both eminently reasonable and wholly consistent with this court’s precedents.”
The dissenting justices did not quarrel with Justice Thomas’s analysis of Mr. Tsarnaev’s objections to how the jury was selected. The justices diverged, however, on whether evidence concerning Tamerlan Tsarnaev should have been admitted.
In a 2013 F.B.I. interview, a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev named Ibragim Todashev admitted to participating with him in the robbery of three drug dealers in Waltham, Mass., in 2011. But he added that Tamerlan Tsarnaev alone had slit the victims’ throats. As Mr. Todashev started to write down his confession, he suddenly attacked the agents, who shot and killed him.
Prosecutors relied on the confession to obtain a search warrant for Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s car.
Judge O’Toole did not allow Mr. Tsarnaev’s lawyers to present evidence about the Waltham murders to support their argument that their client had been under his brother’s influence, saying it would confuse the jury.
Justice Thomas said that ruling was proper, too. “Dzhokhar sought to divert the sentencing jury’s attention to a triple homicide that Tamerlan allegedly committed years prior, though there was no allegation that Dzhokhar had any role in that crime,” Justice Thomas wrote. “Nor was there any way to confirm or verify the relevant facts, since all of the parties involved were dead.”
“It certainly did not show that, almost two years later, Tamerlan led and dominated Dzhokhar in a manner that would mitigate Dzhokhar’s guilt,” Justice Thomas added.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Justice Thomas’s opinion in the case, United States v. Tsarnaev, No. 20-443.
In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that he would have allowed Mr. Tsarnaev to present evidence concerning the Waltham murders.
“Dzhokhar conceded his guilt,” Justice Breyer wrote. “The only issue was whether he deserved to die.”
He added that the jury had seemed to take account of the brothers’ relationship.
“The jury did not recommend the death penalty for the charges related to the actions Dzhokhar took together with Tamerlan, and only recommended death for the charges related to the actions Dzhokhar took alone,” Justice Breyer wrote.
Evidence concerning the Waltham murders could have made a difference, he wrote. “This evidence may have led some jurors to conclude that Tamerlan’s influence was so pervasive that Dzhokhar did not deserve to die for any of the actions he took in connection with the bombings, even those taken outside of Tamerlan’s presence.”
He added that if Mr. Todashev’s confession was reliable enough for a search warrant it was presumably reliable enough to put before a jury.
More generally, he wrote that “death penalty proceedings are special.”
“Unlike evidentiary determinations made in other contexts,” Justice Breyer wrote, “a trial court’s decision to admit or exclude evidence during a capital sentencing proceeding is made against the backdrop of a capital defendant’s constitutional right to argue against the death penalty.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined almost all of Justice Breyer’s opinion.
Lawyers for the federal government during the Trump administration had urged the Supreme Court to hear the case, United States v. Tsarnaev, No. 20-443. The Biden administration pursued it, even though President Biden has said he will work to abolish the death penalty and the Justice Department under his administration has paused federal executions.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Friday that Mr. Biden “believes that Tsarnaev should be punished” but “has deep concerns about whether capital punishment is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our justice and fairness.”
The reaction in Boston was muted and mixed.
Representative Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat, said in a statement that the court’s decision was “deeply disappointing.”
“State-sanctioned murder,” she said, “is not justice, no matter how heinous the crime.”
Gov. Charlie Baker, who supported the jury’s decision in 2015 to impose a death sentence on Mr. Tsarnaev, welcomed the ruling.
“While nothing can ever bring back those we lost on that terrible day, I hope today’s decision will bring some sense of justice for victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and their families,” he said.
Dic Donahue, a retired transit police officer who was shot during the firefight after the bombings, said he was not surprised by the mixed reactions. “It was the jury’s decision,” he said, “and the penalty is out of my hands.”
Source: New York Times, Staff, March 3, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
