On Wednesday the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in US v. Tsarnaev, a case involving Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, accompanied by his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was convicted of planting pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon in 2013 and sentenced to death. The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit overturned Tsarnaev’s death penalty sentence, due to the district court’s failure to ask each prospective juror during voir dire whether they may have been biased by watching pre-trial news coverage of the case. The US Department of Justice requested that the Supreme Court reinstate the death penalty for Tsarnaev. The Court will also determine whether the district court erred by excluding evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s older brother, was allegedly involved with other crimes prior to the bombing.
The United States’ argument opened with the following:
After watching video of [Tsarnaev] by himself personally placing a shrapnel bomb behind a group of children at the Boston Marathon, the jury in this case returned a nuanced verdict unanimously recommending capital punishment for that specific deliberate act. The court of appeals should have let that verdict stand. Instead, it unearthed a previously unmentioned supervisory rule to invalidate a careful and lengthy jury selection process that a prior panel had praised.
The defense responded that “the district court violated the First Circuit’s longstanding voir dire supervisory rule by refusing to learn whether jurors had been exposed to inadmissible and inflammatory publicity that could prejudice their consideration of the death penalty,” thus leading to unreliable and unreasoned “moral judgment to the offense and the defendant’s culpability.”
The Supreme Court also heard oral arguments in Babcock v. Kijakazi, a case which will determine whether a civil service pension for a “military technician (dual status)” qualifies as “a payment based wholly on service as a member of a uniformed service” under the Social Security Act’s “windfall elimination provision.” The plaintiff, who served as a dual technician for the US National Guard, argued that 42 U.S.C. § 415(a)(7)(A) qualifies him for social security payments.
Oral arguments at the Supreme Court will resume on November 1, 2021.
