On Monday, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, but President Joe Biden wants to end its use. Biden is the first United States president to oppose the death penalty publicly.
According to Axios, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, "Prior to the Trump administration, from 2003 until July 2020, not a single execution was carried out by the Department of Justice.
"The president believes the department should return to its prior practice, and not carry out executions," Bates stated.
In a brief, the Justice Department attorneys argued that punishment against Tsarnaev was warranted due to the "lifetime of unimaginable suffering" he inflicted on others.
In 2013, Tsarnaev stood by watching people near the end of the Boston Marathon, waiting for his shrapnel-constructed bomb to explode. In the aftermath of the explosion, he and his brother killed three people and wounded hundreds of others.
According to the New York Post, the Department of Justice attorneys wrote that, "The jury carefully considered each of the respondent's crime and determined that capital punishment was warranted for the horrors that he personally inflicted — setting down a shrapnel bomb in a crowd and detonating it, killing a child and a promising young student, and consigning several others to a 'lifetime of unimaginable suffering.'"
Despite Biden being against the death penalty, his administration's attorneys have stated that the ruling of the jurors "deserves respect and reinstatement."
In August of 2020, former President Donald Trump tweeted "rarely has anybody" deserved the death penalty more than Tsarnaev, who carried out the act with his older brother Tamerlan who later died after a shootout with police. During the standoff, Dzokhar fled the scene in a Mercedes SUV he and his brother carjacked, running over Tamerlan in the process.
The Supreme Court should hear oral arguments surrounding Tsarnaev's sentencing in March. Currently, Tsarnaev faces multiple life sentences in a supermax prison in Colorado, where he will spend the rest of his life, regardless of the Court's ruling.
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