The Supreme Court on Monday accepted an appeal from the federal government to consider the death penalty for the Boston Marathon bomber.
The court delivered its decision in an unsigned order.
The bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was sentenced to death in 2015 for setting bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon that killed three people and injured hundreds of others. Tsarnaev appealed his sentence, and the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated his sentence last summer, finding that the court that previously convicted him had failed to conduct its jury selection properly.
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In the majority opinion for the case, Judge Ojetta Thompson wrote that the ruling did not exonerate Tsarnaev in any way and advised that the bomber be given another trial to see if he should be executed.
“Dzhokhar will spend his remaining days locked up in prison, with the only matter remaining being whether he will die by execution,” the ruling stated.
The Trump Justice Department responded to the 1st Circuit’s opinion by asking the Supreme Court to overrule and order Tsarnaev’s execution to proceed. Then-acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall described in graphic detail how Tsarnaev’s victims died and said that “one of the most important terrorism prosecutions in our nation’s history” should not be left to the appeals court.
The Justice Department asked the court to hear its case this year and provide a decision by the summer. Then-Attorney General William Barr said in August that he would “do whatever’s necessary” to see Tsarnaev executed.
Tsarnaev pushed back in a brief, arguing that the Supreme Court did not have the standing to review the case.
When President Biden took office, many legal experts predicted that he would drop the case against Tsarnaev. During his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to answer questions about the case because he was a sitting circuit court judge at the time.
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But Garland, whose prosecution led to the death sentence for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, did motion toward a willingness to ease up on death penalty cases more generally.
“I have developed concerns about the death penalty in the 20-some years since then,” Garland said of the McVeigh case. “And the sources of my concern are issues of exonerations of people who have been convicted, of sort of arbitrariness and randomness of its application because of how seldom it’s applied, because of its disparate impact on black Americans and other communities of color.”
