A federal jury sentenced 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death Friday for the bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon.
He and his brother Tamerlan, who was killed in the ensuing police chase, planted explosives that killed three people, blew the legs off 17 others and seriously injured 240 more.
His guilt was never in question. Even the defense rested its case on the idea that Dzhokhar couldn’t really be blamed for the crime because Tamerlan had wielded a cult-like influence over him as an ?impressionable teen.
It was a weak argument and the jury didn’t buy it. He was guilty. No doubt the jurors imagined themselves in the runners’ shoes, imagined the months of training spent qualifying for the marathon, imagined the volume of sweat expended to reach the finish line and imagined the horror when two murderers demanded they give up their blood as well. This empathy is laudable and necessary, but it does not change the fact they gave the wrong sentence.
Tsarnaev should have received life in prison. The fact that he will be executed constitutes a failure of our justice system.
First, it perpetuates a paradoxical American tradition that demands we kill killers to show that killing is wrong. The fact is the margin for error is too high in these cases, and the chance of a wrongfully convicted person being slain by the government charged with protecting them is too horrible a notion to stomach. I would hope it would be too horrible for any citizen ?to stomach.
Secondly, Tsarnaev being given the death penalty robs the victims and their families of closure.
The death penalty, especially on the federal level, takes decades to be mete out and is bogged down with appeals and bureaucracy that will do little more than make sure this murderer’s name stays in the media even longer.
That’s why the Richards family, whose son, Martin, would be 10 now, publicly requested the jury give Tsarnaev life in prison. That sentence would have closed the book on this tragedy.
Of course, even if the jury had known about the Richards’ preference, it’s unknown if they would have cared. Jurors on the federal level have to be “death-qualified” in cases like this, meaning they have to be open to handing down the death penalty, which brings us to our final and most ?damning point.
All of the jurors being death-qualified means they were willing to have a 21-year-old man killed by an executioner with little to no medical training, using drug cocktails mixed by people who think the proportions should do the trick and the side effects of which aren’t always wholly known.
The death penalty costs more than life sentences, is proven to be applied in a racist manner and puts our nation in the company of violent countries like Somalia, North Korea and Yemen. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed a heinous and evil crime two years ago, but adding his death to the toll isn’t justice. The last thing this ordeal needed was more ?bloodshed.
awurdema@indiana.edu
