BOSTON — In a sweeping rejection of the defense case, a federal jury on Friday condemned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
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, which his lawyers never disputed. Mr. Tsarnaev sat stone-faced as the verdict was read.
At the same time, the jury rejected the centerpiece of the defense argument, that he was under the influence of his older brother, Tamerlan, a self-radicalized jihadist. Nor did it believe that being locked away in the supermax prison in Colorado would sufficiently restrict Mr. Tsarnaev’s communications with the outside world.
Only two of the 12 jurors said on the verdict form that they believed he had expressed sorrow and remorse for his actions, a stinging rebuke to Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun who had testified for the defense that Mr. Tsarnaev was “genuinely sorry” for what he had done.
The bombings transformed the marathon, a cherished rite of spring, from a sunny holiday on Boylston Street to a smoky battlefield scene, with shrapnel flying, bodies dismembered and blood saturating the sidewalks; three people were killed, while 17 people lost at least one leg. More than 240 others sustained serious injuries, some of them life-altering.
The packed courtroom was silent throughout the proceedings — warned before the judge and jury entered that any outburst would amount to contempt of court.
When the jury returned at 3:10, the forewoman passed an envelope to the judge. Jurors remained standing while the clerk read aloud the 24-page verdict form that they had filled out. It took him 20 minutes.
It was not clear until the end that the sentence was death, though all signs along the way pointed in that direction.
The jury took 14 hours to reach its sentence, which some legal specialists said was 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 suggested two possible grounds for an all-but-certain appeal: “the failure to grant a change of venue, despite the overwhelming evidence the defense presented about community attitudes in Boston, and the failure to instruct the jury that if a single juror refused to vote for death, the result would be a life sentence.”
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.
“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 speedy at all in a case like this, in which so much of the evidence weighed against the defendant, and they saw no serious 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 that Mr. Tsarnaev’s callousness had struck the jury. “After he blows up this child on purpose, he’s out at the convenience store buying milk, then he smokes a little dope and plans on blowing up New York,” Mr. Kendall said.
Mr. Tsarnaev stood, his hands folded in front of him, as the jurors made their way out of the courtroom. Moments earlier, the judge, George A. O’Toole Jr. of Federal District Court, thanked them and sent them on their way: “So jurors, that’s it. You are now discharged.”
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.
For many in the Boston area, the sentencing brought “a small amount of closure to the survivors, families and all impacted by the violent and tragic events,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said in a statement that did not explicitly praise the verdict. “We will forever remember and honor those who lost their lives and were affected by those senseless acts of violence on our city.”
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch called the death sentence a “fitting punishment.”
The bombing was not a religious crime, said Carmen M. Ortiz, the United States attorney for Massachusetts, but “a political crime designed to intimidate and coerce the United States.”
In Russia, when contacted by a reporter and informed of the verdict, Mr. Tsarnaev’s father, Anzor, simply exhaled and hung up. He then turned off his cellphone.
Kheda Saratova, a human-rights activist in Chechnya who had acted as an adviser to Mr. Tsarnaev’s parents in the weeks after the bombing, said by phone that she talked to the family less than a month ago. “They’ve all been very distressed, especially Anzor,” she said. “Anzor kept saying, “Everything happens by the will of Allah.”
Among those in the courtroom were Bill and Denise Richard, whose 8-year-old son, Martin, had been killed in the attack and whose daughter, Jane, then 7, lost a leg. 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.
INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC
Reconstructing the Scene of the Boston Marathon Bombing
An examination of the injuries and damage in the blast areas.
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. Most cases are still tied up in appeal. In the rest, the sentences were vacated or the defendants died or committed suicide.
The federal government has also effectively imposed a moratorium on executions while the Justice Department examines issues surrounding the drug cocktail commonly used for lethal injection.
The Tsarnaev verdict goes against the grain in Massachusetts, which has no death penalty for state crimes and where polls 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 the jurors in his case had to be “death qualified” — that is, they all had to be willing to impose the death penalty to serve on the jury. So in that sense, the jury was not representative of the state.
On the complicated, 24-page verdict slip, jurors had to weigh the aggravating factors that would justify Mr. Tsarnaev’s death, as well as the mitigating factors, presented by the defense, that would argue for him to live.
Despite that complicated process, Judge O’Toole told jurors that their final decision should not be based on a numerical comparison of aggravating factors to mitigating factors. Rather, he said, they should use their individual judgment and internal moral compass.
The final words that jurors heard before beginning deliberations on Wednesday were a blistering assessment from William Weinreb, the lead prosecutor, about why Mr. Tsarnaev should be executed and not simply locked up.
“The callousness and indifference that allows you to destroy people’s lives, to ignore their pain, to shrug off their heartbreak — that doesn’t go away just because you’re locked up in a prison cell,” Mr. Weinreb told them. “It’s what enables you to be a terrorist, and it’s what insulates you from feelings of remorse.”
Life imprisonment, he added, is the minimum punishment authorized by law for these deaths — the three at the marathon and the death a few days later of an M.I.T. police officer. It is “a lesser punishment than death,” he said, even though some argue that a lifetime in prison is worse.
“Does he deserve the minimum punishment, or do these crimes, these four deaths, demand something more?” Mr. Weinreb asked the jury. “Please ask yourself that question when you go back to deliberate.”
The verdict is a rare defeat for Judy Clarke, the lead defense lawyer and renowned opponent of the death penalty. Ms. Clarke has represented a number of notorious defendants, including Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber; and Jared L. Loughner, who killed six people in an assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
Ms. Clarke’s expertise is in negotiating deals in which her clients plead guilty in exchange for sentences of life in prison. But in this case, the government was determined to get a death sentence and rejected her overtures.
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