On Friday, the Supreme Court of the United States reinstated the death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – the surviving Boston Marathon bomber – after a federal appeals court threw out Tsarnaev’s death sentence.
“By a vote of 6-3, the court rejected defense claims that the judge at Tsarnaev’s 2015 trial improperly restricted the questioning of prospective jurors and was wrong to exclude evidence of a separate crime two years before the bombing,” NBC News reported.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote for the majority in the Supreme Court ruling, wrote, “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.”
In 2013, Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan — both immigrants from Chechnya who turned into Islamic extremists — detonated two pressure cooker bombs at separate spots near the annual Boston Marathon finish line. The blasts killed three and seriously injured hundreds more.
The attack led to a manhunt, which resulted in Tamerlan’s death after he was shot by police. Tsarnaev attempted to hide in a boat in a backyard in Watertown, Massachusetts, before he was located and arrested by authorities.
After a jury convicted Tsarnaev on all counts and sentenced him to death, a “three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit ordered a new sentencing hearing, ruling unanimously that U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. failed to allow enough questioning of potential jurors about how closely they followed extensive news coverage of the bombings,” NBC News reported. “But the Supreme Court disagreed on that issue.”
Justice Thomas explained that trial judges have broad discretion in choosing what questions to ask potential jurors. “That discretion does not vanish when a case garners public attention,” he wrote.
“The appeals court also said the judge should have allowed Tsarnaev’s lawyers to bring up a 2011 triple homicide in the Boston suburb of Waltham that investigators suspected was committed by Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” NBC News reported. “The defense wanted to use the earlier crime to show that the younger Tsarnaev was dominated by his violent older brother and therefore was less responsible for the bombings, because of his influence.”
However, the Supreme Court ruled that the appeals court was also wrong on that point. Thomas wrote that The Federal Death Penalty Act (FDPA) “proceedings are not evidentiary free-for-alls. The district court may exclude information under the FDPA ‘if its probative value is outweighed by the danger of creating unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, or misleading the jury.’”
