Jury votes unanimously to send Tsarnaev to death for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing, which left three dead and more than 260 injured

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death for his role in the 2013 bomb attack on the Boston Marathon – an attack that killed three people, left more than 260 wounded and stunned the country.



In April, the same jury at a federal court in Boston found Tsarnaev guilty on 30 charges relating to the attack.

Seventeen of those counts carried a possible death sentence, and despite hearing mitigating evidence from family members – and others such as Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun who opposes the death penalty – the jury voted unanimously to send 21-year-old Tsarnaev to his death.

Tsarnaev will remain in the custody of the US marshals service until the sentencing hearing, at which he will have – if he so chooses – the opportunity to speak. That date has not been set yet, but he will not be handed over to the department of corrections until then.

Outside the courthouse on Friday, US attorney Carmen Ortiz thanked the jury, the prosecutors, and her law enforcement team, and said that the decision “shows that even the worst of the worst deserve a fair trial”.

Asked by the Guardian if she had taken into account the op-ed in the Boston Globe by Bill and Denise Richard, the parents of the bombers’ youngest victim, in which they called for the government to drop the death penalty, into account, Ortiz said that she had. “What they had to say had a great impact,” she said.



“We came to this decision [to push for the death penalty] not lightly,” she continued, “and there was a long process of conversations at different levels [in the Justice Department].”

Liz Norden, a survivor of the bombing whose two sons each lost a leg, and who has long spoken out in favour of executing Tsarnaev, said that today felt like justice had been served. Asked if she planned to be present for the execution, she replied without hesitation “oh, I’ll be there every step of the way.”

Michael Ward, an off-duty fireman who was one of the first responders on the scene, put it more succinctly. “He’s going to hell, and he’s going to get there early.”

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As for almost the whole trial, Tsarnaev’s face registered little or no emotion as the jury handed down their unanimous sentence of death. Only two jurors indicated they believed he had “expressed sorrow and remorse” for his crimes.



The sentence brings to end the five-month-long trial, in which 154 witnesses testified, more than 40 of them in the penalty phase.



Prejean was the final witness for the defence in the penalty phase of the trial, in which, having found Tsarnaev guilty on the 17 capital counts, the jury heard new evidence from the prosecution and defence designed to help them weigh “aggravating factors” against “mitigating factors” in deciding whether to put Tsarnaev to death for his crimes.



In her closing argument on Tuesday, defence attorney Judy Clarke made one final appeal to the jury for mercy. “Mercy is never earned, it is bestowed,” she said.

But the jury seems to have been more receptive to the prosecution’s argument that the only fitting punishment for Tsarnaev’s crimes was death.



The sentence, which mandates the government to kill the 21-year-old Tsarnaev by lethal injection at the federal correctional facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, is subject to appeal.

The jury were tasked with weighing “aggravating factors” against “mitigating factors” in deciding whether to send Tsarnaev to his death. The defence had hoped that they would give more weight to their central mitigating areas – first and foremost that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been the controlling mastermind of the operation; and second that the younger Tsarnaev had shown remorse.



But in the end the jury gave those two areas short shrift. As they ran through the form, only three of them voted that they believed Tsarnaev would not have committed the crimes if not for his older brother; and only two found that he had expressed “sorrow and remorse” for his crimes. Ultimately, the jury unanimously decided that the aggravating factors outweighed the mitigating factors - and handed down a sentence of death.

In April, following the guilty verdict, Bill and Denise Richard, the parents of Martin Richard, who was killed by the bomb placed by Tsarnaev near the marathon’s finish line, wrote a front-page op-ed in the Boston Globe calling for the state to stop seeking the death penalty in this case, saying that Tsarnaev’s likely appeals process would give them little room for closure.

At eight years old, Martin Richard was the youngest victim of the bombing.

But the government was implacable in its push for the death penalty. In her opening statement in the penalty phase, assistant US attorney Nadine Pellegrini showed a CCTV still of Tsarnaev, caught just after placing a pipe bomb in a backpack behind where the Richard family were standing, by the finish line, outside the Forum restaurant on Boylston Street.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Runners continue to run towards the finish line of the Boston Marathon as an explosion erupts on 15 April 2013. Photograph: Dan Lampariello/Reuters

Pellegrini asked the jury: “Is there anything that will explain how he can walk away from that happy and crowded scene, look over his shoulder knowing that he left death there, and keep on going?

“He simply is callous and indifferent to human life,” Pellegrini continued. “It is his character that makes the death penalty just.”

Much of the defence’s case for mitigation rested on the influence of Tsarnaev’s older brother Tamerlan, who was killed during a shootout with police in the days following the bombing.

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Tamerlan, the jury heard, was a powerful, dominant figure; witness after witness for the defence testified that the younger Tsarnaev was more passive.

One witness statement, from an FBI interview with Magomed Dolakov, a Russian friend of the two brothers who could not be found to testify personally to court, described the younger Tsarnaev as “a puppy” following his brother.

But despite recent polling showing the majority of Boston residents were against the death penalty for Tsarnaev, the jury was unmoved by the arguments of the defence.

This may partly have been because in order to be eligible to serve in a federal death penalty trial the jury had to be “death-qualified” – open to the idea of capital punishment – despite the fact that Massachusetts abolished the death penalty at state level three decades ago.

The bombing horrified the country. In the chaotic and panic-filled minutes following the attack, paramedics gave 30 people red stickers – code that they were, at most, 60 minutes from death. Blood pooled on Boylston Street. Investigators immediately went to work searching through closed-circuit footage trying to find the identity of the bombers. As the human cost began to be counted in the hospitals, a vast search began, led by the FBI.

On 18 April, pictures of the two bombers, identified as the Tsarnaev brothers, were released to the press. Shortly afterwards, the two went on the run; they shot Sean Collier, an MIT police officer, in his patrol car, and carjacked a Mercedes SUV, and exchanged gunfire with Watertown police officers, throwing pipe bombs at them.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in the exchange, run down by the SUV driven by his brother as he escaped. After a manhunt which shut down large sections of the city, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found hiding in a dry-docked boat in Watertown.

Loretta Lynch, the US attorney general, welcomed the “ultimate penalty”.

“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev coldly and callously perpetrated a terrorist attack that injured hundreds of Americans and ultimately took the lives of three individuals: Krystle Marie Campbell, a 29-year-old native of Medford; Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China; and Martin Richard, an eight-year-old boy from Dorchester who was watching the marathon with his family just a few feet from the second bomb,” she said. “In the aftermath of the attack, Tsarnaev and his brother murdered Sean Collier, a 27-year-old patrol officer on the MIT campus, extinguishing a life dedicated to family and service.”

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She added: “We know all too well that no verdict can heal the souls of those who lost loved ones, nor the minds and bodies of those who suffered life-changing injuries from this cowardly attack. But the ultimate penalty is a fitting punishment for this horrific crime and we hope that the completion of this prosecution will bring some measure of closure to the victims and their families.”

If Tsarnaev is unsuccessful in appealing against his sentence, he will be only the fourth person executed by the federal government in the past 50 years. However, it is considered still fairly unlikely that he would reach the death chamber.

This is partly due to the case’s potential for practically endless appeals, which could last for decades, and partly due to the nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs caused by an international pharmaceutical boycott. Some federal death row inmates have already been waiting 22 years in limbo.