Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Sentenced to Death by Execution 1 Month After Jurors Found Him Guilty of 2013 Terror Attack
A jury of five men and seven women sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death by execution on Friday after finding him guilty on 30 federal charges last month for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
The April 15, 2013, bombings killed three people and left over 260 others wounded.
The death penalty was delivered by the same jurors who convicted Tsarnaev last month on 30 counts of carjacking, robbery and using weapons of mass destruction resulting in death. Only 17 of the charges, however, carried the possibility of the death penalty, for which the jury sentenced him to death on six of the counts.
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The 12 jurors handed down the death sentence for Tsarnaev for his role in killing Martin Richard and Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student.
According to the Boston Globe, jurors decided not to sentence Tsarnaev to death for the two victims who were killed by his brother, Tamerlan, which include Krystle Campbell, 29, and MIT Police Officer Sean A. Collier, 27, "whom the defense argued was shot to death by Tamerlan, not Dzhokhar."
Tsarnaev is said to have shown little emotion as he heard the verdict, according to USA Today.
"Tsarnaev looked straight ahead, showing no emotion, as the sentence was read. Jurors wiped away tears as the judge thanked them for their service."
The sentence arrived after the jury had listened to the testimonies of 63 witnesses and deliberated for over 14 hours.
Jurors weighed whether Tsarnaev should face life in prison without parole or death. Further, the group was tasked with considering several factors, including whether or not Tsarnaev was cold and calculating, as prosecutors contended, or if the 21-year-old was under the influence of his older brother, among other things.
In handing Tsarnaev the death penalty, it appears as though jurors rejected the defense's efforts to prove that Tsarnaev's older brother was the mastermind of the attack.
U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. told the jury, "You can and you should be justly proud of your service in this case," USA Today reported.
Friday marks the first time a federal jury has sentenced a terrorist to death in the post-Sept. 11 era, said Kevin McNally, a director of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, according to the The New York Times.
In a previous interview with The Christian Post in April 2013, Angelica Vasquez, then a 22-year-old student at Boston College who attended the marathon and witnessed the horror firsthand because she was seated across the street from the explosion, described the explosions.
Vasquez told CP that she initially assumed fireworks were going off, but realized she was wrong when her boyfriend and former Israeli soldier grabbed her and told her to wait as he anticipated another explosion.
"We got to our bleacher seats and we stood in the middle section and all of a sudden we heard a huge bang that felt like an impact or slight jerk. Everyone was confused," she said. "Then, all of a sudden, the second bomb went off and glass from the buildings shattered everywhere and that's when I knew we were under attack."
The Boston Globe reported Friday that Tsarnaev arrived in the U.S. with his family when he was 9 years old. And during the trial, "jurors heard from his teachers in Cambridge that as a young boy, he was an A student, smart, popular, and kind."
"But jurors also heard about Tsarnaev's upbringing in a dysfunctional immigrant Chechen family ... And an expert on Chechnya described how that country's struggles for independence became intertwined over the last two decades with the global jihad movement by Islamic militants."
The Globe also reported that Tamerlan became "obsessed" with jihad after his parents returned to Russia in 2012, and was "the only adult figure in [Dzhokhar's] life."
During the manhunt for the two brothers that shut down the Boston metropolitan area Dzhokhar was eventually found badly injured hiding in a privately-owned boat in Watertown, Massachusetts. His brother, Tamerlan, died earlier during a shootout with police.
