The Supreme Court said Monday that it will decide whether to reinstate the death penalty for the Boston Marathon bomber, who was convicted in 2015 for killing three people and injuring hundreds with bombs at the 2012 Boston Marathon.
According to NBC News, the Supreme Court will likely hear the case this fall, and then issue a ruling by mid-2022, nearly a decade after the bomber and his since-deceased older brother planted bombs near the finish line of the race.
Although the bomber, whose name has been withheld per Daily Wire policy, was given multiple death sentences in 2015, a panel of appeals judges tossed them after finding that the sitting jurors had not been properly screened for bias, reports the New York Times. Lawyers for the bomber had pointed to the existence of tweets against the bomber, including old posts from the jury forewoman. On the day the bomber was sentenced to death, another juror tweeted that the bomber should be sent to a “dungeon where he will be forgotten about until his time comes,” reports the news agency.
The panel of judges also agreed that jurors should have been informed that the older brother was connected with a 2011 triple murder, a disclosure that the bomber’s lawyers believed could show that the older brother had a more influential role in the attack, reports The Washington Post.
The Associated Press notes that the Supreme Court won’t decide whether to reimpose the death penalty for the bomber until the fall. And even if the bomber’s sentence was reinstated, many inmates on federal death row spend years waiting for their execution date to arrive.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, asked for the Biden administration’s stance on the bomber’s case and federal executions going forward, said on Monday: “President Biden has made clear, as he did on the campaign trail, that he has grave concerns about whether capital punishment, as currently implemented, is consistent with the values that are fundamental to our sense of justice and fairness. He’s also expressed his horror at the events of that day, and his actions, [the bomber’s] actions I should say. He spoke to the people of Boston on the first anniversary of the horrible crime, as he said then, ‘We are Boston. We are America. We own the finish line.'”
According to the Department of Justice, the bomber and his older brother, who died following a police shoot-out, planted “two pressure cooked bombs filled with shrapnel among the crowds of spectators” gathered to watch the marathon and then fled from the scene. The subsequent blast killed three people, including an 8-year-old boy, maimed seventeen others, and injured hundreds more. From the DOJ:
Three days later, on April 18, [the bomber] and his brother, armed with five IEDs and a Ruger semiautomatic pistol that [the bomber] had borrowed from a friend, drove to the MIT campus where they shot and killed MIT Police Officer Sean Collier and attempted to steal his service weapon. Approximately 20 minutes later, they carjacked a Mercedes SUV, kidnapped the driver, and forced him to drive to a gas station, robbing him of $800 along the way. After the driver managed to escape, the brothers drove to Laurel Street and Dexter Avenue in Watertown, where they exploded additional IEDs and engaged in a firefight with Watertown police officers. During the stand-off, [the bomber] drove the carjacked vehicle at three officers, attempting to kill them, and ran over his brother as he escaped. [The bomber] hid in a winterized boat in a Watertown backyard until his apprehension and arrest the following night.