By: Hanna Humphreys
“Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, Arizona shooting convict Jared Loughner…. These are some of the biggest names in recent US crime, and each is serving life in prison after avoiding the death penalty, thanks, in part, to US defense attorney Judy Clarke. Many Americans believed Clarke was unbeatable in the courtroom until a federal jury sentenced Boston bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev to death on May 15th. Tsarnaev assisted his older brother Tamerlan, who died in a police shootout days later, plant the two pipe bombs that exploded at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three people including eight year old Martin Richard, and injuring over 250 more with flying shrapnel.
Like the rest of America, the majority of Boston remains shocked by the outcome of the trial. Although he faced death on 17 accounts, a poll shows that over 60 percent of Boston residents opposed Tsarnaev’s execution, preferring life without parole over decades of appeals cases. The Richard family especially laments the sentence, understandably believing that the following appeals will cause more reliving of the most devastating day of their lives when they lost a son and their daughter lost a leg. They personally asked the court to drop the death penalty charge, but the twelve “death qualified” jurors deciding on the case took only 14 hours to agree unanimously on the death penalty.
The sentence is especially controversial in Boston because the jury was not representative of the general population. In order to be “death qualified,” each potential juror had to sit through a tedious interview process to prove he or she is not opposed to the principle of the death penalty, nor has direct emotional ties to anyone injured by the 2013 attack. These disqualified a large number of residents from sitting on the jury.
In the liberal state of Massachusetts, the last executions occurred in 1947. Now only 30 percent approve of the death penalty, and even fewer in the Boston area. The lack of support for the jury has been overwhelming, though without cameras in the courtroom, few outsiders were exposed to the evidence against 21 year old Tsarnaev, who apparently showed no reaction when the verdict was read. Over the past few days since the sentencing, the city has been somberly grieving over the past, a feeling which is sure to last through multiple future appeals.