The Supreme Court, dividing on ideological lines, reinstated the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The three liberal justices voted Friday in favor of Tsarnaev’s challenge to his death sentence, alleging juror bias. But the six Republican appointees moved to reinstate the execution.
In an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the majority of the court said the trial court did a thorough job in selecting a jury — and that a question over media coverage jurors may have seen on the terrorist attack wasn’t warranted.
“The District Court did not abuse its broad discretion by declining to ask about the content and extent of each juror’s media consumption regarding the bombings,” Justice Thomas wrote.
“The court recognized the significant pretrial publicity concerning the bombings, and reasonably concluded that the proposed media-content question was ‘unfocused,’ risked producing ‘unmanageable data,’ and would at best shed light on ‘preconceptions’ that other questions already probed,” he added.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, in a dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said Tsarnaev should have been able to introduce evidence that his older brother, who was killed in a manhunt after the attack, was allegedly linked to prior murders and coerced him into violence.
“The District Court was wrong when it described the … evidence as lacking ‘any probative value,’” he wrote.
The death penalty was first sought against Tsarnaev by then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. during the Obama administration.
The Supreme Court decision Friday did not address the constitutionality of the death penalty.
The justices focused on whether the jury was impartial when considering the punishment for the al Qaeda-inspired bomber. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in 2015 after he and his brother Tamerlan placed homemade bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013, killing three people and severely injuring hundreds more.
Tsarnaev’s attorneys had petitioned the appeals court to overturn the jury’s death sentence, arguing lawyers did not get to quiz prospective jurors about media coverage and whether that coverage led to bias against the defendant.
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Tsarnaev’s sentence in 2020, but the Trump administration moved to reinstate the punishment of death by lethal injection. Tsarnaev’s lawyers told the high court two jurors lied during jury selection about their conduct on social media.
“Those activities included a Twitter post calling [Tsarnaev] a ‘piece of garbage,’ and a Facebook conversation in which a juror was exhorted to ‘get on the jury’ to ensure that [Tsarnaev] would be ‘taken care of,’” the lawyers argued in court papers.
The Tsarnaevs were inspired by al Qaeda, and Tsarnaev told federal investigators the siblings were angry about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which Muslims were being killed.
The brothers fled from the police once they were identified as suspects in the bombing and killed one police officer during the chase. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was apprehended, but Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in the pursuit.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts Democrat, said the high court’s move on Friday was “deeply disappointing.”
“The death penalty is a cruel and inhumane punishment that has no place in society,” she said in a statement. “State-sanctioned murder is not justice, no matter how heinous the crime. 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.”
Ms. Pressley called for Congress to pass the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act of 2021, which would ban federal executions.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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