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Supreme Court questions Biden’s ‘endgame’ opposing death penalty but calling for Boston Bomber execution



The Supreme Court appeared supportive of upholding the death sentence against one of the perpetrators of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers during oral argument on Wednesday.

However, they questioned how the president could simultaneously oppose the death penalty overall and have the Justice Department argue for its use in this case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who committed the bombings with his now-deceased brother, Tamerlan, killing three people and injuring hundreds.

“I’m wondering what the government’s endgame is here,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked lawyers for the federal government. “If you win presumably that means that [Tsarnaev] is relegated to living under threat of a death sentence that the government doesn’t plan to carry out, so I’m just having trouble following the point.”

The Independent has reached out to the Justice Department and White House for comment.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted on all 30 counts against him in 2015, which authorities called “one of the most important terrorism prosecutions in our nation’s history,” and his lawyers don’t deny his role in the terror attack. (Tamerlan, his older brother, was killed in a shooting with police).

Instead, they are challenging his death sentence, which they argue shouldn’t stand because the jury wasn’t sufficiently screened for bias or given enough information on Tamerlan’s alleged violent criminal past, both of which could’ve altered the final punishment awarded.

In 2020, a federal appeals court tossed out Tsarnaev’s death sentence, a decision which the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court. That effort has since continued under the Biden administration despite the president’s stated opposition to capital punishment.The conservative-leaning Supreme Court appeared largely unmoved by Tsarnaev’s arguments during oral arguments.

They questioned whether admitting more evidence of Tamerlan’s alleged criminal past, including a key role in a triple-murder, would’ve changed the underlying fairness of his brother’s eventual terrorism trial. The triple-murder allegation was, they suggested, now a dead-end, based largely off of the statement of a man named Ibragim Todashev, who was later killed after attacking an FBI agent during an interview.

“You’d have another trial within a trial about what happened,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

“It would focus the jury on something the judge concluded couldn’t be resolved,” Chief Justice John Roberts added.

The more liberal Justice Elena Kagan, appointed during the Obama administration, pushed back, however, noting that other incidents from Tamerlan’s past had been considered, so the murder case could’ve further illuminated his alleged violent influence over his brother.

“It’s different that Tamerlan yelled in a mosque, and it’s different that Tamerlan assaulted a fellow student, and it’s different that Tamerlan yelled at people, but all of this was admitted to show what kind of person Tamerlan was and what kind of influence he had over his brother,” Justice Kagan said, refering to other pieces of evidence that came up at the trial. “And yet, the court, again, you know, refuses to admit evidence of a gruesome murderous crime in which, according to the evidence that was kept out, Tamerlan had extraordinary influence over a co-felon in getting him to murder three people.”

Stay tuned for more details on this breaking news story.



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