The United States is to seek a rare
federal death penalty for the surviving young student accused of the Boston
marathon bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Attorney General Eric Holder said
Thursday. Three people were killed and around 260 wounded on April 15 last year
when two bombs made of
Tsarnaev, then 19, and his
26-year-old brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev were cornered by police after a four-day
manhunt. Tamerlan died after an exchange of fire with police and Dzhokhar was
wounded.
"The nature of the conduct at
issue and the resultant harm compel this decision," Holder said in a
statement on the prosecution of the 20-year-old, a US citizen from a Chechen
Muslim family.
The shaggy-haired onetime student
has pleaded not guilty to 30 federal charges related to the bombings, including
17 serious charges that can carry sentences of death or of life in prison.
These charges include using a weapon
of mass destruction resulting in death, as well as conspiracy and bombing of a
place of public use resulting in death, and carjacking.
Tsarnaev is also charged in
connection with the shooting death of a campus police officer at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the brothers' wild overnight
getaway attempt.
The brothers are said to have built
the bombs with help from an online Al-Qaeda magazine, but they are not accused
of having received help from any organized foreign terror group.
Carmen Ortiz, a federal prosecutor
in Massachusetts, home to Boston, said in a statement: "We support this
decision and the trial team is prepared to move forward with the
prosecution."
She added: "The case will now
continue to proceed through the pre-trial process and the next scheduled court
event is a status conference set for February 12, 2014."
The full trial is likely to begin in
the autumn and is expected to take about five months.
Massachusetts abolished the death
penalty in 1982, but Tsarnaev is accused under federal law.
Of nearly 500 death sentences sought
at federal level, only 70 were handed down and there have been only three
actual executions since the reinstatement of the federal death penalty in 1988.
If Tsarnaev is executed, he will be
the first defendant to be be put to death at federal level since Timothy
McVeigh, who went to the death chamber in June 2001 for the Oklahoma City
bombing.
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