Boston bomber sentenced to death

A US jury yesterday sentenced Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for helping to carry out the 2013 attack that killed three people and injured 264 at the world-renowned race. It took 15 hours to reach a decision.

The federal jury chose death by lethal injection for Tsarnaev, 21, over its only other option: Life in prison without the possibility of release.

The same panel last month found the ethnic Chechen guilty of placing a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the race’s crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, as well as fatally shooting a policeman. The bombing was one of the highest-profile attacks on US soil since September 11, 2001.

During 10 weeks of testimony, the jury heard from about 150 witnesses, including people whose legs were torn off by the shrapnel- filled bombs.

William Richard, the father of bombing victim Martin Richard, described the gut-wrenching decision to leave his eight-year-old son to die of his wounds so that he could save the life of his daughter, Jane, who lost a leg but survived.

Prosecutors described Tsarnaev as an adherent of al-Qaeda’s militant Islamist views who carried out the attack as an act of retribution for US military campaigns in Muslim-dominated countries.

Defence attorneys opened the trial on March 5 with the blunt admission that Tsarnaev committed all the crimes of which he was accused. However, they said their client was a junior partner in a scheme hatched and driven by his brother, Tamerlan, 26. He died after the gunfight, which ended when Dzhokhar ran him over with a stolen car.

The jury’s decision does not mean death is imminent for Dzhokhar. US District Judge George O’Toole will formally sentence Tsarnaev to death at a hearing sometime in the next few months. Defence attorneys are likely to appeal the decision.

The death penalty is very controversial in Massachusetts, which has not put anyone to death in almost 70 years and abolished capital punishment for state crimes in 1984. Tsarnaev was tried under federal law, which allows for lethal injection.

Polls had shown that a plurality of Boston-area residents opposed executing Tsarnaev. The opponents included Martin Richard’s family and the sister of Sean Collier, the MIT policeman who was shot to death three days after the bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers.

Just three of the 74 people sentenced to death in the US for federal crimes since 1988 have been executed. The first was Timothy McVeigh, put to death in June 2001 for killing 168 people in his 1995 attack on the federal government office building in Oklahoma City.

Reuters

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