A jury in Boston voted to execute Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, refuting his lawyers’ argument that his Muslim older brother that was radicalized pulled him into the scheme him and defeating Massachusetts’ popular opposition to the death penalty. Tsarnaev said nothing when the verdict was announced at about 3:30 p.m ET. He sat in his chair and stayed expressionless as U.S. District Judge George O’Toole thanked members of the jury, some of whom wept.
After he is formally sentenced by O’Toole this summer, Tsarnaev will likely find himself at the U.S. Bureau of Prison’s death row in Terra Haute, Indiana, where he’s expected to embark on an appeals procedure that could last years before he’s finally killed by lethal injection. At 21, he’ll become the youngest person on federal death row.
But in the short term, the sentence closes a significant chapter in Boston’s healing from the April 15, 2013 bombing, by which twin blasts rocked the race’s crowded downtown finish line, killing three spectators, injuring more than 260 others, and inflicting a grievous psychological wound on one of America’s earliest cities. The explosions, on a local holiday were the worst act of terror on American soil since 9/11.
Although the death sentence is the legal prerogative of the United States in this case, and is justified under the federal law, there is a human rights argument that sentencing someone to death denies them the right to life – enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The death penalty is also recognised as having certain limitations. One major objection to the death penalty is the risk of false conviction. Since 1976 in the United States (when the Supreme Court reintroduced the death penalty) about 1,270 people have been executed. What is particularly disturbing is that University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross led a study which determined that at least 4% of death row inmates are or were innocent but this had only become apparent due to the introduction of forensic DNA testing. The risk that society is executing innocent people should be enough to justify the abolition of the death penalty in any context.
However, there are also other concerns about the death penalty which include that the penalty does not appear to deter crime in any meaningful way. It also is open to political abuse and is recognised as being used in a discriminatory way. for these reasons, the international human rights movement has always been categorically against the death penalty.