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Thread: Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev - Federal Death Row

  1. #311
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Opinion:

    Reinstatement of marathon bomber's death sentence exposes Democrats' need to hide radicalism

    By Andrew C. McCarthy
    The Hill

    Are Republicans paying attention? If they are, they have taken note of the Supreme Court’s decision — at the anti-capital punishment Biden administration’s urging — to reinstate the death penalty against Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They are also studying the incredible testimony of President Biden's judicial nominees, including Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose Supreme Court confirmation hearings begin in two weeks.

    If so, they are learning that Democrats know their radical positions on law and order are indefensible. In a time of rising crime, disorder, and a growing sense of national insecurity, the courts and law enforcement should be decisive issues in this year’s midterm elections. Republicans ought to own them.

    The terrorist Tsarnaev’s case before the high court had more intrigue than interesting legal issues. Last year, I contended that the First Circuit federal appeals court’s reversal of the death penalty that had been unanimously recommended by a jury in Boston and then imposed by the trial judge, George O’Toole, was a classic in progressive abracadabra.

    Capital sentences were common throughout the United States when the Constitution was ratified. They have been upheld by the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Constitution explicitly assumes the propriety of the state’s placing the life of an accused in jeopardy provided there is due process of law. Consequently, regardless of how philosophically hostile the First Circuit’s three-judge panel was to the death penalty, it had no tenable way to hold it unconstitutional.

    Consequently, the panel, which produced a mammoth opinion by Obama-appointee Ojetta Rogeriee Thompson, did what is often done in these circumstances: It hunted for alleged errors that it could portray as significant enough to vacate the death penalty, but not so grave as to disturb the alternative sentence of life-imprisonment, and then essentially said: Why bother executing him when he’s going to spend the rest of his days in custody?

    This First Circuit’s reasoning was dismantled by the Supreme Court’s 6-3 majority, which displayed the court’s ideological divide between six justices who, to greater or lesser degrees, hew to constitutional originalism and judicial restraint, and three who are committed progressives.

    As Justice Clarence Thomas explained, the trial judge’s procedure for questioning jurors was eminently fair and did not fail to probe adequately for media bias; and the judge’s decision to exclude clearly unreliable hearsay evidence about a murder allegedly committed by Tsarnaev’s older brother and fellow bomber, Tamerlan, was sound. Since a very forgiving “abuse of discretion” standard applies to trial judge’s decisions about jury voir dire and the admissibility of evidence, Judge O’Toole’s clearly correct rulings were easy to uphold. Not surprisingly, the dissenting progressive justices, like the First Circuit, rationalized that the death sentence should have been avoided.

    What was surprising, however, was that the Biden Justice Department pursued the case. Understand: Biden officials are in the same place as the First Circuit and the Supreme Court’s progressive dissenters. The administration is avowedly anti-death penalty.

    Biden, a lifelong political weathervane, has characteristically changed his position with the political winds: a strong proponent of capital punishment as a senator in the high-crime eighties and nineties, when Democrats posed as tough on crime, but suddenly opposed to it when his party turned against law-enforcement and framed the death penalty as racist.

    The winds are forever swirling, though. While Democratic Powers-That-Be are woke progressives, ordinary Americans — including rank-and-file Democrats and independents — are not. It is one thing to oppose capital punishment in the abstract, as Biden did on the campaign trail (or at least in statements issued from his basement). It would be quite another thing to oppose capital punishment for one of the Boston Marathon bombers, who willfully deployed nail- and shrapnel-laden explosives, sadistically killing three innocent people, including a young child, and maiming hundreds of others.

    Politically, in an actual case involving so heinous a mass-murder attack, Biden’s administration could not bring itself to oppose the death penalty — just as the Obama/Biden administration’s anti-death penalty attorney general, Eric Holder, could not bring himself to resist seeking capital punishment when Tsarnaev was indicted in 2013.

    Yet Biden — being Biden — is engaged in cynical hypocrisy. Even though his Justice Department appealed the First Circuit’s reversal of the death penalty, Biden has imposed a moratorium on the execution of death-penalty sentences. He has promised that no death-row inmate will be put to death on his watch. That is, the president will try to get away with telling the public he vindicated capital punishment for a vicious jihadist murderer, while simultaneously assuring the radicals who call the Democratic tune that he remains a committed capital punishment naysayer.

    Such hypocrisy is not a death penalty bug, it’s a Democratic Party feature.

    Last year when Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the D.C. Circuit federal appeals court, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked her if she believed in a “living Constitution.” This was not a trick question. Even non-lawyers grasp that the “living Constitution” — the notion that our fundamental governing document is somehow “organic” — is the animating conceit of the legal left, empowering progressive judges to locate new rights and mandates in the emanations adrift from its penumbras.

    Judge Jackson, however, claimed she had never developed a view on the matter. Yes, we’re to believe that Ketanji Brown Jackson of Harvard College, who clerked on the Supreme Court — for Justice Stephen Breyer, a “living Constitution” devotee — after serving as editor of the Harvard Law Review, and then litigated criminal cases as a private lawyer before serving as a federal district judge for eight years, somehow never thought much about whether judges are bound by our law’s text and its meaning at the time that text was adopted. Sure.

    And don’t miss last week’s questioning of Arianna Freeman, the progressive lawyer Biden has nominated to the Third Circuit federal appeals court, by Sen. Joh Kennedy (R-La.). Again and again, Kennedy pressed Freeman on whether she subscribes to the philosophy that the government may invoke “prosecutorial discretion” as a pretext for refusing to enforce laws on “social justice” grounds. Freeman talked up, down, and around the question — a “word salad without dressing,” Kennedy quipped — but she wouldn’t answer it, which, of course, made the answer obvious.

    The Biden administration and the progressive lawyers it is nominating to the bench at record speed know they cannot defend politically what they want to do by wielding the power of law. They have to camouflage their radicalism because it would repulse the American mainstream. That is a huge opportunity for Republicans. They don’t have the votes to stop Judge Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Her hearings, however, are their chance to highlight Biden’s judges, Biden’s Justice Department, and how essential it is that we elect Republican congressional majorities that can check them.

    Heading into the 2022 midterms, no issue is more critical to the nation’s future.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciar...ocrats-need-to
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  2. #312
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mastro Titta's Avatar
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    Court weighs tossing Boston marathon bomber’s death sentence

    By Alanna Durkin Richer
    The Associated Press

    BOSTON — Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s attorney urged a federal appeals court Tuesday to throw out the 29-year-old’s death sentence because of juror misconduct claims just months after it was revived by the nation’s highest court.

    Tsarnaev is making a renewed push to avoid execution after the Supreme Court last year reinstated the death sentence imposed on him for his role in the bombing that killed three people and injured hundreds near the finish line of the marathon in 2013.

    His lawyers are now challenging issues that weren’t considered by the Supreme Court, including whether the trial judge wrongly denied his challenge of two jurors who defense attorneys say lied during jury selection questioning.

    One juror said she had not commented about the case online but had retweeted a post calling Tsarnaev a “piece of garbage.” Another juror said none of his Facebook friends had commented on the trial, even though one had urged him to “play the part” so he could get on the jury and send Tsarnaev to “jail where he will be taken of,” defense attorneys say. Tsarnaev’s lawyers raised those concerns during jury selection, but the judge chose not to look into them further, they say.

    “This case was tried in Boston on a promise ... that despite the extraordinary impact of the marathon bombing on this community,” a through questioning of potential jurors would remove anyone unqualified, Tsarnaev attorney Daniel Habib told the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges. “That promise was not kept.”

    The Justice Department has continued to push to uphold Tsarnaev’s sentence even after Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 imposed a moratorium on federal executions while the department conducts a review of its policies and procedures. The department has not indicated how long it might maintain the hold, which came after former President Donald Trump administration’s put to death 13 inmates in its final six months.

    President Joe Biden has said that he opposes the death penalty and will work to end its use, but he has taken no action to do so while in office. And the moratorium doesn’t prevent federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty, as they are in the case of a man currently on trial for killing eight people on a New York City bike path in 2017.

    William Glaser, a Justice Department lawyer, said the trial judge did nothing wrong in his handling of the jurors. Glaser acknowledged that the jurors made inaccurate statements but said other disclosures they made to the court suggest they were merely misremembering.

    “There is no indication in this record that the inaccuracies were the kind of knowing dishonesty that would lead to disqualification,” Glaser said.

    But Judge William Kayatta Jr. questioned how the trial judge could know that without looking further into Tsarnaev’s claims. And Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson told the Justice Department lawyer she found it difficult to see how Tsarnaev can’t at least plausibly claim that the juror told to “play the part” was knowingly lying.

    “If, for instance, the Facebook friend had said ‘get on the jury and make sure that the death penalty isn’t imposed,’ it’s hard for me to believe that you wouldn’t be in here arguing the opposite of what you are arguing now,’” she told Glaser.

    Some survivors of the bombing who attended the hearing met briefly with Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins afterward outside the courtroom. Marc Fucarile, who lost a leg and suffered other serious injuries in the blast, said he came to the arguments to let the judges know survivors are “still paying attention to what they are doing.”

    “At a certain point we need to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough. It is not in question what he did,” Fucarile told The Associated Press.

    Tsarnaev’s lawyers acknowledged at the very beginning of his trial that he and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, set off the two bombs that killed Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford, Massachusetts; and 8-year-old Martin Richard, of Boston.

    They have argued, however, that he shouldn’t be put to death, saying his brother radicalized him and was the mastermind of the attack.

    Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 of all 30 charges against him, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and the killing of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Officer Sean Collier during the Tsarnaev brothers’ getaway attempt. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a gunbattle with police a few days after the April 15, 2013, bombing.

    The 1st Circuit in 2020 overturned Tsarnaev’s death sentence and ordered a new penalty-phase trial to decide whether he should be executed, finding that the judge did not sufficiently questioning jurors about their exposure to extensive news coverage of the bombing. But the Supreme Court justices, by a 6-3 vote, agreed with the Biden administration that the 1st Circuit’s ruling was wrong.

    https://apnews.com/article/massachus...a08ae831d7f4df

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