U.S. Supreme Court to consider restoring Tsarnaev’s death sentence

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear the federal government’s bid to reinstate Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence for helping carry out the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

The Justice Department filed an appeal of a lower court’s 2020 decision ordering a new trial over the sentence Tsarnaev should receive for the death penalty-eligible crimes for which he was convicted, Reuters reported.

Tsarnaev, now 27 years old, and his older brother, Tamerlan, precipitated five days of panic in Boston when they detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon’s finish line on April 15, 2013, and then tried to flee the city. In the days that followed, they also killed a police officer. Tsarnaev’s brother died after a gunfight with police.

Jurors in 2015 found Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 counts he faced and later determined he deserved execution for a bomb he planted that killed Martin Richard, 8, and Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 23. Restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, was also killed.

In overturning Tsarnaev’s death sentence, the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the trial judge "fell short" in screening jurors for potential bias following pervasive news coverage of the bombings, and it ordered a new trial over sentencing for the death penalty-eligible charges.

The Justice Department appealed that ruling, arguing that the 1st Circuit adopted a standard that wrongly denied trial judges the "broad discretion" to manage juries allowed under Supreme Court precedents.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments and issue a ruling in its next term, which starts in October and ends in June 2022.