US Seeking Death Penalty in Marathon Bombing - New York Times ~ Google News

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Thursday that it would seek the death penalty against Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, the man accused of killing and maiming people with homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line last year.

The decision sets in motion the highest-profile federal death penalty case since Timothy J. McVeigh was prosecuted and executed for the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The decision, however, is not cast in stone. In nearly half of federal death penalty cases, prosecutors withdraw the threat of execution before trial, typically because of a plea deal, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who had the final say on whether to authorize prosecutors to seek the death penalty, has said he personally opposes capital punishment, but he has authorized its use many times.

Prosecutors say Mr. Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, built bombs out of pressure cookers and detonated them 13 seconds apart among spectators at the finish line. The explosions killed three people and injured more than 260 others.

A police officer at M.I.T. was also killed in a subsequent manhunt for the brothers. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who investigators say they believe conceived and led the attack, was killed in a shootout with the police. He was 26. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 20, was later caught hiding inside a boat.

No trial date has been set and Mr. Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty.

His defense team includes Judy Clarke, one of the nation’s top defense lawyers in death penalty cases. She has represented Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, a Sept. 11 conspirator

Investigators say they have strong evidence against Mr. Tsarnaev, including surveillance camera footage that the F.B.I. says shows him slipping a backpack off his shoulder and placing it on the ground shortly before the explosion. Law enforcement officials have also said that, in interviews with the F.B.I., Mr. Tsarnaev admitted his involvement in the attack.

Mr. Tsarnaev, who is Muslim, is said to have told investigators that he and his brother had been motivated by their religious beliefs. But investigators have said they found no evidence that a foreign terrorist group hatched, directed or supported the attack.

The Tsarnaevs are immigrants of Chechen heritage who came to the United States almost a decade ago from Kyrgyzstan, after living briefly in the Dagestan region of Russia.

Massachusetts abolished the death penalty at the state level in 1984 and has not executed a prisoner since 1947. Since the federal government reinstated its death penalty in 1988, it has executed just three people, including Mr. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.