Wrong the first time and still wrong now

The LA Times reports: 

The Justice Department will seek to reinstate a death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man who was convicted of carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Atty. Gen. William Barr said Thursday.

... “We will do whatever’s necessary,” Barr said. “We will take it up to the Supreme Court, and we will continue to pursue the death penalty.”

This isn't about a finding of innocence. Tsarnaev is the surviving Boston Marathon bomber; he did it; he's a murderer. But this overturns his death sentence, unless Barr wins a different verdict from a higher court.

The appellate court didn't question the local federal judge's ruling that Tsarnaev could get a fair trial in Boston in 2015 -- although residents of that city had endured being locked in their homes while police chased the killers. The appellate court saw nothing wrong with the trial judge vigorously excluding from the jury anyone who had qualms about the death penalty. (This is considered proper law; such a panel is called "death-qualified.")

No, the decision to throw out the death penalty assessed by the 2015 jury turned on the trial judge's feeble questioning of potential jurors for bias. His inquiries had not been adequate to assess their "impartiality." It turned out the woman who became the jury foreman had called Tsarnaev "a piece of garbage" on social media. And the judge learned that before the trial took place.

So Barr's Justice Department wants to go back to court to be allowed to kill Tsarnaev.

This is crazy. 

The only reason Tsarnaev was tried in a federal court in the first place was that Massachusetts doesn't have a death penalty. Murder is ordinarily tried in state courts. The usual course of action, even for so hideous a crime as the Boston Marathon bombing, would have been to let the state's justice system do its job. 

But Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department thought the Marathon terrorist should die. And didn't think a Boston jury would opt to kill him. Polling at the time of the trial showed that a majority of the people in the region didn't support execution.They don't equate state killing with justice.

A remarkable report in the NY Times at the time of the verdict captured the local sentiment: 

“I was shocked,” said Scott Larson, 47, a records manager who works near the finish line. “The death penalty — for Boston.”

To many, the death sentence almost feels like a blot on the city’s collective consciousness.

 ... Neil Maher, who spent his teenage years in Boston and returned this weekend for his class reunion at Boston College High School, said the verdict had surprised and disappointed him.

“They ought to demonstrate a little humanity,” said Mr. Maher, 66, who lives in Frederick, Md. “Killing a teenager’s not going to do anything. I think it’s just a kind of visceral revenge. I think that in three years, the people of Boston and the people on the jury will feel bad about this decision.”

I am not aware that anyone is polling now to find out. 

New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen wrote a book about the crimes of the Central Asian teenager who became a terrorist. She reminds us:

... “Just to be crystal clear,” [appellate Judge] Thompson wrote, “Dzhokhar will remain confined to prison for the rest of his life, with the only question remaining being whether the government will end his life by executing him.”

Tsarnaev is held in solitary confinement under what are called “special administrative measures,” which include a ban on communicating with anyone whom Tsarnaev didn’t know before he was jailed and in any language other than English. This is, in all likelihood, how he will spend the rest of his life. ...

Enough.