"The jury carefully considered each of respondent's crimes and determined that capital punishment was warranted for the horrors that he [Tsarnaev] personally inflicted — setting down a shrapnel bomb in a crowd and detonating it, killing a child and a promising young student, and consigning several others to a lifetime of unimaginable suffering," the department's 48-page brief read, adding that "determination by 12 conscientious jurors deserves respect and reinstatement by this Court."
Last July, a federal court of appeals reversed three of Tsarnaev's convictions, scrapped his death sentence and ordered a new trial in his case. The Justice Department under the Trump administration filed an appeal against the ruling with the Supreme Court.
The Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April, 2013, killed three people and injured hundreds of others. Dzhokhar and his older brother Tamerlan were found guilty of the attack. Tamerlan was killed by the police while on the run on 19 April of the same year, while Dzhokhar was arrested the following day and sentenced to death by lethal injection in May 2015. He will remain in prison for life because he has not challenged the life sentences against him.
