Published 12:27 IST, August 3rd 2020
Trump calls for re-sentencing of bomber after appellate court overturns death penalty
US President Donald Trump has demanded the death penalty for the Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after an appeals court overturned the sentence.
US President Donald Trump has demanded the death penalty for the Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after an appeals court overturned the sentence. Donald Trump on August 2 took to his official Twitter handle to call for the re-sentencing of the terrorist as he feels that the decision of the appeals court to overturn the death penalty is not acceptable. Trump said that Tsarnaev deserves the death penalty for the crimes that he had committed and the court also agreed on the barbarity of the crime but still they decided to overrule the death penalty.
A federal appeals court in Massachusetts on July 31 instructed a district court to hold a new penalty-phase trial to determine Tsarnaev's sentence for crimes that got him death penalty citing neutrality in the jury selection process. However, the appeals court upheld most of Tsarnaev's convictions, such as imprisonment for life. The 27-year-old's attorney argued that Tsarnaev's older brother, who died in a gunfight with police four days after the incident, was responsible more for the bombings of the two, saying that the younger one had no history of violence prior to the attack.
Boston bombing
Tsarnaev, along with his older brother in 2013, when he was just 19-years-old, planted three homemade bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds of others. The attack is considered one of the worst domestic terrorism acts in the United States. Tsarnaev is a Kyrgyz-American of Chechen descent, who along with his family travelled to the United States on a tourist visa in 2002 and subsequently applied for asylum. Tsarnaev officially became an American citizen in 2012, one year before he carried out the attack.
Updated 12:27 IST, August 3rd 2020