Tsarnaev gets needle: Boston bomber unleashed the worst terrorist attack after 9/11

BOSTON

A federal jury on Friday sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings, rejecting defense lawyers’ arguments that the young man had fallen under the way of his older brother and was remorseful over the suffering he caused.

The jury of seven women and five men rendered its decision after deliberating for more than 14 hours. As the verdict was read, Tsarnaev displayed no sign of emotion.

The outcome — two years after the bombings — was a victory for prosecutors, who said the former college student worked in tandem with his brother and carried out the attack in a “heinous, cruel and depraved manner.”

Tsarnaev, 21, will be transferred to a federal prison in Indiana, where he will stay until he is put to death by lethal injection. His lawyers will likely appeal the sentence.

It has been more than a decade since the federal government executed an inmate, and the Obama administration is currently reviewing its protocol for carrying out the death penalty after a botched Oklahoma state execution last year.

Tsarnaev faced the possibility of death on 17 charges; he was sentenced to death on six of them.

In closing arguments of the penalty phase, prosecutors depicted him as a ruthless killer.

“The defendant deserves the death penalty, not because he’s inhuman, but because he’s inhumane,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Weinreb said. “Because of his willingness to destroy other people’s lives for an idea.”

Jurors had to be unanimous in their decision to sentence Tsarnaev to death. In April, the same jury that sentenced Tsarnaev found him guilty of all 30 charges that he faced in connection with the 2013 bombings, one of the worst terrorist attacks in the US since the September 11, 2001, hijackings. He and his brother detonated two bombs near the finish line of the marathon, killing three people and wounding more than 260 others; 17 of the injured lost limbs.

Tsarnaev was also convicted in the killing of a police officer employed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the aftermath of the attack.

Prosecutors argued that he and his brother – who died in a shootout with police days after the bombings -- had embraced radical Islam and wanted to punish America for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.