Supreme Court reinstates Boston Marathon bomber's death penalty -20-443 United States v. Tsarnaev (03/04/2022)

When cruelty is the point Clarence Thomas is your go-to, so John Roberts, as Chief Justice, assigned to Thomas the task of explaining why Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two Boston Marathon bombers, should return to death row. Thomas - unnecessarily - begins with a recitation of the the details of the crime - which the defendant did not contest. He had sought mercy on the grounds that he had fallen under the influence of his domineering elder brother.

The jury rejected that argument and voted for death.

But the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found that the District Court had failed to follow the law of the Circuit which demanded special attention to possible juror bias in high-profile cases:

Thomas rejects that proposition, yielding a familiar 6-3 vote with five Catholics and one convert to Episcopalian embracing the death penalty - demonstrating again their independence from Church anti-capital punishment doctrine.

- GWC

20-443 United States v. Tsarnaev (03/04/2022)

In an attempt to show Tamerlan’s domineering nature, Dzhokhar sought to introduce the statements of Ibragim Todashev, who had alleged during an FBI interview that, years earlier, Tamerlan had participated in a triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts. 

[The District Judge barred the evidence.  The Court of Appeals reversed.]

The dissent recognizes that the District Court enjoyed significant discretion over its evidentiary decisions. But because this is a death penalty case, the dissent scrutinizes those decisions with particular care to find that the District Court abused its discretion. In doing so, the dissent ignores the traditional abuse-of-discretion standard, which calls for a reviewing court to defer to the sound judgment of a district court unless the decision was “manifestly erroneous.” General Elec. Co. v. Joiner, 522 U. S. 136, 142. More specifically, the dissent suggests that a district court presiding over death-penalty proceedings should be more hesitant to find that evidence risked confusing the jury. But nothing in §3593(c) suggests that Congress intended for any such hesitancy. Ultimately, the District Court reasonably decided to exclude the evidence under §3593(c)’s balancing test.