Trump demands death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber after court’s shock decision to spare his life
DONALD Trump has demanded the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev - after his life was spared by the appeals court.
said the federal government must now challenge Friday's shock decision for the sake of those who died in the murderous atrocity on April 15, 2013.
He tweeted: "Rarely has anybody deserved the death penalty more than the Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
"The court agreed that this ‘was one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks since the 9/11 atrocities.’ Yet the appellate court tossed out the death sentence. So many lives lost and ruined.
"The Federal Government must again seek the Death Penalty in a do-over of that chapter of the original trial.
"Our Country cannot let the appellate decision stand. Also, it is ridiculous that this process is taking so long!"
Tsarnaev, 27, and his older brother Tamerlan killed three people and injured more than 260 when they detonated a pair of shrapnel-filled bombs along the marathon’s route.
Tamerlan later died following a shootout with cops when he went on the run in the city.
Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in 2015 for his role in the horrific attack but appealed his sentence last year saying it was ridiculous to think there could be impartial jurors in Boston, where his trial was held.
Then on Friday of Appeals in Boston overruled the death sentence
They upheld much of Tsarnaev’s conviction but ordered a lower-court judge to hold a new trial strictly over what sentence Tsarnaev should receive for the death penalty-eligible crimes he was convicted of.
The federal government is now reviewing the ruling and prosecutors could ask the full appeals court to reconsider or even appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh wants the prosecutors to meet with victims and their families before they decide whether to hold another death penalty trial.
Rick DesLauriers, who led the FBI’s Boston office during the bombings, said he hopes they petition the Supreme Court to review the federal appeals court decision and possibly eliminate the need for another trial.
He said the ruling as an “unfortunate example of judicial activism” and “a slap in the face” to the jurors.
“It’s an unnecessarily painful resurrection of this issue for the victims and their families,” said DesLauriers, who retired from the FBI about three months after Tsarnaev’s capture.
Adrianne Haslet, who lost part of her left leg in the bombing, wrote on social media that she is “ready to testify again.”
“He is a threat to all of us and he needs to die,” she wrote.
Rebekah Gregory, who had her left leg amputated below the knee after being injured in the first blast, wrote on Twitter that the appeals court decision “prolongs the nightmare we have been living the last SEVEN years.”
“What about the innocent lives that were taken that day,” she wrote. “Where is their justice?”
Tsarnaev’s lawyers had argued that intense media coverage had made it impossible to have a fair trial in Boston.
The lawyers pointed to social media posts from two jurors suggesting they harbored strong opinions even before the 2015 trial started.
The appeals judges, in a hearing on the case in early December, devoted a significant number of questions to the juror-bias argument.
They asked why the two jurors had not been dismissed, or at least why the trial judge had not asked them follow-up questions after the social media posts came to light on the eve of the trial.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers say one of the jurors, who would go on to become the jury’s foreperson, published two dozen tweets in the wake of the bombing.
One post was posted after Tsarnaev was captured called him a “piece of garbage.”
Tsarnaev’s lawyers argued the case should not have been tried in Boston, where potential jurors were exposed to heart-wrenching, wall-to-wall media coverage about the attacks and the victims.
Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan sparked five days of panic in Boston on April 15, 2013, when the duo detonated two homemade pressure cooker bombs at the marathon’s finish line and then went into hiding.
Three night later, as the brothers attempted to flee the city, they sparked a new wave of terror in the city when they hijacked a car and shot dead Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier.
Tamerlan died later that night after a gunfight with police, which ended when Dzhokhar ran him over with a stolen car.
Soon after police locked down Boston and the surrounding communities for almost 24 hours, with heavily armed officers conducting house-to-house searches.
Dzhokhar was found in the suburb of Watertown, hiding in a dry-docked boat in a backyard.
In 2015, a federal jury found Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 counts he faced, which included conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction.
The jury later determined he deserved execution for a bomb he planted that killed eight-year-old, Martin Richard and 23-year-old Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu.
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The brothers later ambushed and fatally shot an MIT police officer, Sean Collier.
Tsarnaev has been serving his sentence in a high-security super-max prison in Colorado.
Federal death sentences are a rarity and executions are even less common.
The federal death penalty statute was reinstated in 1988 and expanded in 1994, and until this year, the government had carried out three executions.
Most executions are carried out by states, and the number of executions has been declining in recent years.