Tsarnaev’s Death Sentence

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death on Friday afternoon for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing. Three people died—Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi, and Martin Richard—when Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, each left a pressure-cooker bomb amid the spectators; a fourth, Sean Collier, an M.I.T. security officer, was shot and killed as the brothers tried to evade capture. More than two hundred and forty other people were injured, some of them dismembered. Tsarnaev’s guilt was never in doubt—“It was him,” his lawyer, Judy Clarke, said on the first day of the trial. On April 8th, he was convicted on thirty counts, seventeen of which were capital crimes. Before deciding on death, the jury heard from victims and their families, and from people who knew and loved Tsarnaev. They were given a twenty-four-page sentencing verdict form, to assist in sorting through gateway and mitigating and aggravating factors proposed by the defense and the prosecution, and decide whether Tsarnaev should die. The death-penalty vote was unanimous, as it had to be; had one juror disagreed, Tsarnaev would have been sentenced to life in prison instead. They deliberated for fourteen and a half hours.

Clarke, in trying to save Tsarnaev’s life, said that Tamerlan, who was killed in the chase, had led him astray. This was conveyed, in various forms, in mitigating factors No. 3 to 7, 14, 17, and 18. In the end, the jurors were not won over; no more than five agreed on any of those points, the Boston Globe reported, and on some of them only two did. The prosecution said that, of all the places that Dzhokhar could have left a backpack containing a bomb, he’d chosen a spot where children had gathered. This was the basis for statutory aggravating faction No. 6: that Tsarnaev was responsible for the death of Martin Richard, “who was particularly vulnerable due to youth.” Martin was eight years old, and in the third grade. The jurors all agreed that this was an aggravating factor. Martin’s parents were in the courtroom when the sentence was read. Last month, the Richardses said that they would prefer taking the death penalty off the table, if there was a life sentence and Tsarnaev waived all appeals. They wanted this to be over.

There can be a slight shock, in a high-profile capital case, when a jury decides to kill someone who has become familiar to the public. But this is what the death penalty does, and how it functions. Since 1976, fourteen hundred and eight people have been executed in the United States. One of them was executed in Texas three days ago. The Globe had, in an editorial, argued that Tsarnaev should be spared, speaking of “the exceptionally high standards for a federal execution.” (This was a federal trial; there is no state death penalty in Massachusetts.) Public opinion in Boston was running the same way—less than twenty per cent thought that Tsarnaev should die, according to a poll at the end of April. The other eighty per cent had what were undoubtedly a range of reasons. Maybe they were persuaded that Tamerlan was more culpable. Or maybe they saw a potential for some sort of redemption, even if Tsarnaev remained in prison for the rest of his life—he was nineteen when the bombing took place, and is twenty-one now. Some may have had more intricate theories about what happened that day. The simplest way to sum it all up, though, may be the feeling that there had been enough killing already.

Massachusetts is a liberal place, where the death penalty is unpopular. Historically, it has been unevenly applied in this country, in ways affected by race (particularly the race of the victim), class, region, and blind chance. Its benefits are elusive. To sit on a jury in a capital case, one needs to be “death qualified”—to be willing to kill someone after voting to convict him. If you believe in the death penalty, the verdict form, with all its factors, may look as simple as a road map: How could it but lead to Tsarnaev’s execution? The ways in which death qualification can distort a pool are clear. But then the death penalty twists everything it touches. Defense lawyers and prosecutors construct long questionnaires about remorse. There are years of desperate appeals. States scramble to buy chemicals that companies are ashamed to manufacture. Tubes are put into arms the wrong way, killings are botched, and spectators wonder what they have gathered to witness.