A FEDERAL jury sentenced Dzhokar Tsarnaev to death on Friday, May 15 for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. He will be transferred to a super-max federal prison and will face death by lethal injection.
For several weeks, the 12-member jury in the Boston Marathon bombing trial heard testimony to deliberate whether to sentence Tsarnaev to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole, for the attack at the marathon finish line that killed three and injured more than 250.
Tsarnaev, 21, sat calmly in the impending days before the final verdict, while federal prosecutors argued that the ethnic Chechen was a “terrorist who wanted to punish America,” in one of the highest-profile attacks in the US since Sept. 11, 2001.
Prosecutors said he helped carry out the attack in a “heinous, cruel and depraved manner,” and was not sorry for what he had done.
Defense attorneys contended that young Tsarnaev was influenced by his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, who spearheaded the bombings and was killed in a police chase several days after the attack. The defense urged the 12-member jury to give more weight to mitigating factors, such as Dzhokar’s youth and his brother’s heavy influence.
Tsarnaev sat motionless, sitting with hands clasped in front of him and head slightly bowed, while the verdict was read. The jurors reportedly deliberated for more than 14 hours over the past few days. They agreed with prosecutors on 11 of the 12 aggravating factors they cited.
The jurors had to be unanimous in their decision to sentence Tsarnaev to death. Last month, they found him guilty of all 30 charges that he faced in connection with the marathon bombings, including the murder of an MIT police officer Sean Collier.
Among the bombing victims were a 23-year-old Chinese graduate student, Lingzi Lu; 29-year-old Krystle Campbell, and the youngest person to die in the bombings, 8-year-old Martin Richard.
A note that the 21-year-old wrote while hiding in a boat after a gunfight with police said: “Now I don’t like killing innocent people, but in this case it is allowed because American needs to be punished.” The note, along with Tsarnaev, was found four days after the April 15, 2013 attack.
“These are the words of a terrorist who is convinced he did the right thing,” said Assistant US Attorney Steven Mellin, during the closing arguments of the trial. “He killed indiscriminately to make a political statement…his actions have earned him a sentence of death.”
The defense contended, had the teenager not been under the spell of his older brother, Tamerlan (who was reportedly “obsessed with jihad”), would never have set off the bombs or murdered a police officer following the attack.
“The horrific events of the Boston Marathon bombing cannot be told or understood with any degree of reality without talking about Tamerlan,” said defense attorney Judith Clarke to jurors. “Tamerlan left the United States wanting to wage war. He was rejected as a warrior. He came back to the U.S. as a jihadi wannabe. He couldn’t fit into any movement, so he would create his own.”
Clarke noted that Tamerlan and the Tsarnaev’s mother, Zubeidat, both stunned their family back in Russia when they turned to militant Islam.
In the government’s rebuttal, prosecutor William Weinreb challenged the defense claim that Tsarnaev is remorseful, saying that he developed “on his own,” without coercion from his brother, the extremist views of a terrorist and an ideology that justifies killing innocents as a political act of revenge.
That belief system “insulates you from feelings of remorse,” Weinreb said.
On Wednesday, May 13 he cautioned jurors not to impose a life sentence that would constitute the minimum penalty allowable by law, saying, “The defendant deserves the death penalty not because he’s inhuman but because he’s inhumane.”
In their sentencing, the jury swept aside the defense’s pleas that Dzhokhar is “just a kid” who fell under the influence of his brother, nor that he is remorseful.
“You can’t see a trace of remorse on his face,” said Mellin.
Victims of the marathon bombings were divided on the jury’s sentence. Although some argued openly that they believed Tsarnaev deserved capital punishment, others, including the parents of 8-year-old victim Martin Richard, insisted his life be spared.
“Sentencing [Tsarnaev] to death could bring years of appeals, and prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives,” the parents wrote in The Boston Globe.
It has been more than a decade since the federal government has executed an inmate, and the Obama administration is currently reviewing its protocol for carrying out the death penalty, after a botched Oklahoma state execution last year.
(Allyson Escobar/AJPress with reports from Reuters, USA Today, The Washington Post, Associated Press)
(www.asianjournal.com)
(LA Weekend May 16-19, 2015 Sec. A pg.1)
