The US Department of Justice will ask the Supreme Court to reconsider the overturning of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, as requested by Donald Trump in early August.
“After long deliberations, and taking into account the opinion of the many victims of this case, the Ministry of Justice will ask the Supreme Court to reconsider the decision of the appeals court to quash the death sentence “by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Massachusetts federal prosecutor Andrew Lelling said in a statement Monday evening.
“Our hope is that this will result in the reinstatement of the original sentence and avoid a retrial of the party concerning the death penalty”
Sentenced, at a minimum, to life imprisonment
On July 31, a Boston court of appeal quashed this death sentence, and referred the case to the competent court to decide on a new sentence.The judges of this court had notably accepted the defense argument that the process selection process had been flawed. They had stressed that Djokhar Tsarnaev would remain sentenced, at a minimum, to life imprisonment.
But Donald Trump had criticized their decision, believing that “the death penalty had rarely been as deserved” as for Djokhar Tsarnaev. “The federal government must again call for the death penalty (…) our country cannot leave the appeal decision in force,” he tweeted.
A student of Chechen origin, Djokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in June 2015 for having planted, with his older brother, Tamerlane, two homemade bombs near the finish line of the Boston marathon, killing three and injuring 264.
His defense has always claimed that the young man, aged 19 at the time (27 today), was under the influence of his elder, who was killed by law enforcement three days after the attack. During their cavalcade, the two brothers shot a police officer.
Donald Trump regularly calls for an increased use of the death penalty and with the approach of the November 3 election, his government seems determined to carry out a record number of federal executions. Returning to a practice that had been interrupted for 17 years, the Republican government has already carried out three lethal injections in July, and more are planned by the end of September.
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