A courtroom sketch of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Yahoo/Reuters/Jane Flavell Collins.
A jury has found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more then 200. Yahoo/Reuters. The jury will now have to decide whether or not to sentence Tsarnaev to death. Tsarnaev, along with his brother who died in a shootout with the police, had been accused of placing a pressure cooker bomb at the finish line at the Boston Marathon as well of killing a police officer and hijacking a civilians vehicle during their crime spree. The defense will now try to convince the jury that Dzhokhar was not the major player in the attack while his brother, Tamerlan, was the ringleader.
My Comment:
Well this result was not unexpected. Dzhokhar had no real defense. He was instrumental in the attacks. Tamerlan may have been the ringleader but Dzhokhar was a willing participant. He was radicalized and determined to cause harm. There really was no other interpretation of the crime that lets him off the hook, short of some kind of crazy conspiracy theory. There is absolutely no evidence of that, so this conviction looks just fine for me.
As for the death penalty, I'm generally am not a fan but if anyone deserves to die because of what they did it is Dzhokhar. This isn't a case where there is any chance of an innocent man dying. Dzhokhar did it and almost no one tries to argue that fact. What will the jury do? Who knows, juries are unpredictable. My guess is that they will find for death but all it would take is for one person on the jury to not agree with the death penalty to have a sentence of life be imposed instead. Even if he does get sentenced to life, at least he won't be on the streets and he will pay for what he did.
As for the bombing itself, I didn't have a blog back when it happened, but I do remember what happened quite well. There was a lot of things that the case raised that had little to do with the actual attacks. First there was some seriously shoddy investigation going on. The FBI released some photographs from the marathon and Reddit poured over it. Another reason why Reddit sucks, they ended up accusing a pair of random people that had nothing to do with the bombing. Glen Beck of The Blaze did the same thing, ruining what little credibility they have.
I was also very uncomfortable with the reaction the police had to the bombing. They were driving around with tanks and assault rifles, doing house to house searches and locking people into their homes. Despite the seriousness of the attack the response was completely disproportionate to the actual threat. Especially because it was a civilian who discovered Dzhokhar after the lockdown was lifted.
This actually led to a conversation, mostly among libertarians, about the militarization of the police, a conversation that gained some steam after the Cliven Bundy ranch standoff and the initial days of the Ferguson situation. Unfortunately the issue died completely after Ferguson since the riots that happened there were a rather strong argument in favor of the militarization of the police...
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