Tsarnaev receives death sentence for Boston Marathon bombings

Federal Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for carrying out, along with his brother, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and wounded 264.

Tsarnaev had admitted staging the attack, the worst on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, and he spoke on Wednesday for the first time at the trial and apologized “to victims and survivors.”

“I am sorry for the lives I have taken, for the suffering I have caused, and for the terrible damage I have done,” said Tsarnaev to a packed but silent Boston courtroom, as reported by The Boston Globe.

The judge’s sentence, which makes official the unanimous guilty verdict arrived at by the jury on May 15, does not put an end to the court proceedings, however, because now the defense may appeal, as it has said it will do, with the result that Tsarnaev could remain on Death Row for decades.

O’Toole said Wednesday that, as had been speculated, Tsarnaev will be placed on Death Row at the Terre Haute, Indiana, prison.

The death sentence against the 21yearold Tsarnaev had been requested on the federal level, given that the state of Massachusetts abolished the practice in 1980.

In his final remarks to the accused, the judge responded to his allusions to Allah in his apology, saying that if Tsarnaev believes in a God who wants someone to kill people, he believes in a cruel God which cannot be the God of Islam.

The judge also said that nobody would remember that Tsarnaev’s teachers and friends liked him, but rather that he “murdered and maimed innocent people” and “did it willfully and intentionally.”

Before Tsarnaev was allowed to deliver his statement, more than 20 victims of the bombings gave impact statements in court expressing the pain and suffering they had experienced, although some of the victims said that they had forgiven him for his deed.

Tsarnaev was found guilty on May 15 of six of the 17 charges filed against him that could have carried the death penalty, although a total of 30 charges were filed.

Among the charges was using weapons of mass destruction. He and his brother, Tamerlan, who died a few days after the attack during a police pursuit, had placed backpacks containing homemade bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

The pair also killed an MIT police officer while they were being pursued.