The Supreme Court on Friday reimposed the death sentenced for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, reversing a federal appeals court ruling. The Supreme Court’s 6 to 3 decision rejected the defense’s argument that the judge at Tsarnaev’s 2015 trial improperly restricted the questioning of prospective jurors and was wrong to exclude evidence of a separate […]
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The Supreme Court on Friday reimposed the death sentenced for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, reversing a federal appeals court ruling.
The Supreme Court’s 6 to 3 decision rejected the defense’s argument 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 prior to the bombing, Just the News reports.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, made up of the court’s six conservative justices.
In dissent for the court’s three liberal justices, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, “In my view, the Court of Appeals acted lawfully in holding that the District Court should have allowed Dzhokhar to introduce this evidence.”
Breyer called on the court to reconsider the death penalty.
“I have written elsewhere about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the imposition of the death penalty ... This case provides just one more example of some of those problems,” he wrote in a section of his dissent that his liberal colleagues did not join.
Tsarnaev was convicted of joining his brother, Tamerlan, in planting and detonating two pressure cooker bombs near the Boston Marathon finish line in 2013, killing three people and injuring hundreds.
