21 year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death Friday for the Boston Marathon bombing. The jury deliberated for 14 hours over three days.
Tsarnaev was convicted last month of all 30 charges against him, including use of a weapon of mass destruction. Seventeen of those charges carried the possibility of a death sentence. The case is likely to go through years of appeals.
The Massachussets ACLU said this verdict is an outlier. “Victims' families and survivors in this case asked that federal prosecutors take the death penalty off the table and, instead, accept a sentence of life in exchange for no possibility of appeal or parole.” They said this decision doesn’t change the fact that Americans increasingly reject capital punishment.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, “We know all too well that no verdict can heal the souls of those who lost loved ones, nor the minds and bodies of those who suffered life-changing injuries from this cowardly attack. But the ultimate penalty is a fitting punishment for this horrific crime and we hope that the completion of this prosecution will bring some measure of closure to the victims and their families.”