It would be a hard slog for President Joe Biden to persuade Congress to abolish the federal death penalty as he promised, but the least he could do is to stop enforcing it. To the contrary, his Department of Justice is picking up where President Donald Trump’s left off in pushing for the execution of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving perpetrator of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, in which 3 adults and a child died and hundreds were wounded, many gravely. The First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld 27 of his 30 convictions but voided his 3 death sentences, ruling that prospective jurors should have been questioned individually on what they had read or heard about the intensely publicized case, and sent it back for a new trial just on the punishment. That, and the precedent at stake, are what the government’s recently filed Supreme Court brief aims to prevent. There is also a secondary issue over the judge’s refusal to allow testimony on earlier murders allegedly committed by Tsarnaev’s e...
Striving for a World without Capital Punishment