BOSTON — Two years after bombs in two backpacks transformed theBoston Marathon from a sunny rite of spring to a smoky battlefield with bodies dismembered, a federal jury on Friday condemned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his role in the 2013 attack.
In a sweeping rejection of the defense case, the jury found that death was the appropriate punishment for six of 17 capital counts — all six related to Mr. Tsarnaev’s planting of a pressure-cooker bomb on Boylston Street, which his lawyers never disputed. Mr. Tsarnaev, 21, stood stone-faced in court, his hands folded in front of him, as the verdict was read, his lawyers standing grimly at his side.
Immediate reaction was mostly subdued.
“Happy is not the word I would use,” said Karen Brassard, who suffered grievous leg injuries in the bombing. “There’s nothing happy about having to take somebody’s life. I’m satisfied, I’m grateful that they came to that conclusion, because for me I think it was the just conclusion.”
She said she understood that all-but-certain appeals meant the case could drag out over years if not decades. “But right now,” she said, “it feels like we can take a breath and kind of actually breathe again.”
The bombings two years ago turned one of this city’s most cherished athletic events into a grim tragedy — the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. Three people were killed, and 17 people lost at least one leg. More than 240 others sustained serious injuries.
Last month, after deliberating for 11 hours, the jury found Mr. Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 charges against him in connection with the bombings and the death a few days later of a fourth person, an M.I.T. police officer. The same jury spent 14 hours over three days deliberating the sentence.
With its decision, the jury rejected virtually every argument that the defense put forth, including the centerpiece of its case — that Mr. Tsarnaev’s older brother, Tamerlan, had held a malevolent sway over him and led him into committing the crimes.
According to verdict forms that the jurors completed, only three of the 12 jurors believed that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had acted under his brother’s influence.
U.S. Attorney on Tsarnaev Death Sentence
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would pay for his crimes with his life. Mr. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
By Associated Press on May 15, 2015. Photo by Cj Gunther/European Pressphoto Agency.
Beyond that, the jury put little stock in any part of the defense. Only two jurors believed that Mr. Tsarnaev had expressed sorrow and remorse for his actions, a stinging rebuke to the assertion by Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun and renowned death penalty opponent, that he was “genuinely sorry” for what he had done.
When the jury entered the courtroom at 3:10 p.m. Friday, the forewoman passed an envelope to Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. of United States District Court, who had presided over the case. Jurors remained standing while the clerk read aloud the 24-page verdict form, which took 20 minutes. It was not clear until the end that the sentence was death, though all signs along the way pointed in that direction.
Not a sound was heard in the packed courtroom throughout the proceedings. Those in attendance — survivors, victims’ families, the public, the news media — had been sternly warned that any outburst would amount to contempt of court.
The Tsarnaev verdict goes against the grain in Massachusetts, which has no death penalty for state crimes. Throughout the trial, polls also showed that residents overwhelmingly favored life in prison for Mr. Tsarnaev.
Many respondents said that life in prison for one so young would be a fate worse than death, and some worried that execution would make him a martyr.
But all the jurors in his case had to be “death qualified” — willing to impose the death penalty to serve. In that sense, the jury was not representative of the state.
Mayor Martin J. Walsh said in a statement that the sentencing brought “a small amount of closure to the survivors, families and all impacted by the violent and tragic events.” His statement avoided explicit praise of the verdict.
Some legal experts said that the jury’s 14 hours of deliberations seemed relatively quick in a case this complex. Eric M. Freedman, a death penalty specialist at Hofstra University Law School, said that the relative speed of the verdict could provide the defense with two possible grounds for appeal: “the failure to grant a change of venue, despite the overwhelming evidence the defense presented about community attitudes in Boston,” he said, and “the failure to instruct the jury that if a single juror refused to vote for death, the result would be a life sentence.”
INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC
Reconstructing the Scene of the Boston Marathon Bombing
An examination of the injuries and damage in the blast areas.
“Unfortunately for all concerned,” Mr. Freedman said, “this is only the first step on a long road.”
But other lawyers said that 14 hours was not all that fast and doubted that it provided grounds for appeal.
“I’ve seen juries return verdicts in 25 minutes if the evidence is strong,” said Michael Kendall, a former federal prosecutor in Boston. “But rarely do you have a case like this — a crime of such enormity to start with, plus a mountain of evidence and a defendant who is so unsympathetic.”
He said he thought the jury had been struck by Mr. Tsarnaev’s callousness. “After he blows up this child on purpose,” he said of 8-year-old Martin Richard, the youngest of the victims, “he’s out at the convenience store buying milk, then he smokes a little dope and plans on blowing up New York.”
Among those in the courtroom were Bill and Denise Richard, the parents of Martin and of a daughter, Jane, who was 7 when she lost a leg in the attack. Despite their losses, the Richard family had called for Mr. Tsarnaev to receive life in prison. They said they feared that appeals would drag out a death sentence for years, making it hard for them to move forward with their lives.
The jury, which was not sequestered, had been told to shield itself from news accounts of the trial, and it is not known whether word of the Richard family’s decision had filtered through to any of the jurors.
Many of the jurors looked emotionally depleted after the sentence was read, with some near tears. They had been involved in the case since January, when jury selection began, and had heard testimony over 10 weeks, much of it gruesome and horrific as survivors described losing their limbs and their loved ones.
Judge O’Toole did not set a date for formally sentencing Mr. Tsarnaev. But at that point, some of the survivors will have a chance to tell the court — and Mr. Tsarnaev — how the bombings had affected their lives.
It was the first time a federal jury had sentenced a terrorist to death in the post-Sept. 11 era, according to Kevin McNally, director of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which coordinates the defense in capital punishment cases.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch called the death sentence a “fitting punishment.”
In Russia, when informed of the verdict by a reporter, Mr. Tsarnaev’s father, Anzor, simply exhaled and hung up. He then turned off his cellphone.
Prosecutors had portrayed Mr. Tsarnaev, who immigrated to Cambridge, Mass., from the Russian Caucasus with his family in 2002, as a coldblooded, unrepentant jihadist who sought to kill innocent Americans in retaliation for the deaths of innocent Muslims in American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“After all of the carnage and fear and terror that he has caused, the right decision is clear,” a federal prosecutor, Steven Mellin, said in his closing argument. “The only sentence that will do justice in this case is a sentence of death.”
With death sentences, an appeal is all but inevitable, and the process generally takes years if not decades to play out. Of the 80 federal defendants sentenced to death since 1988, only three, including Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, have been executed. Some of the sentences were vacated or the defendants died or committed suicide.
Most cases are still tied up in appeal.
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