Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who set off two bombs with his brother in 2013 during the annual Boston Marathon, has yet to receive the death penalty. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that writes Reuters news agency† Six of the nine judges in the court voted in favor.
In 2020, a federal court ruled that Tsarnaev’s death sentence should be reversed, because the jurors who determined his sentence at the time had not been sufficiently screened for bias. One of the jury members is said to have made an insulting statement about the perpetrator on social media. To avoid the appearance of bias, it was decided to redo the entire lawsuit.
The U.S. Department of Justice appealed that ruling, taking the case to the Supreme Court. This case was mainly about whether Tsarnaev had received a fair trial, not whether he was guilty. All six conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently rejected the federal court’s ruling, finding that the trial had been fair. In addition, a majority of the chief justices recommended the same measure of punishment: the death penalty.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlane set off two homemade bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in April 2013. Three people were killed and at least 260 were injured. Tamerlane was killed four days later in a shootout with police. Tsarnaev, 19 at the time, was arrested and has since been held in a maximum-security prison in Colorado.