As a follow-up to my August 4 post
on the federal appeals court decision throwing out the death sentence for
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings, I append to
this post a section of the verdict form on mitigating circumstances used at
Tsarnaev’s death penalty hearing. This
form was provided to me by Professor Mary Rose of the University of Texas, and
is available at the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel’s website, https://fdprc.capdefnet.org/verdict-forms.
At the hearing, Dzhokhar argued
that his life should be spared, since his will had been overborn by his
dominating older brother, Tamerlan. The
answers below to Questions 4 through 7 show that three jurors were sympathetic
to this view. But, as the appeals court
rightly noted, the trial judge made a mistaken evidentiary ruling that
prevented the jury from hearing relevant information that might have made the
mitigation argument stronger. The
excluded evidence related to allegations that Tamerlan was involved in an
earlier, unsolved triple homicide. Had
the jury heard and believed this evidence, three or more have held out for a
life rather than death sentence.
When one combines this error with
the errors on questioning jurors for
bias I noted in my previous post on Aug. 4, one sees why it was necessary to
set aside the death sentence.
Jeffrey Abramson, author of We, the
Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy, is a professor of law and
government at the University of Texas at Austin. You can reach him by e-mail
at jabramson@law.utexas.edu.
Excerpt
from Verdict Form on Mitigating Circumstances
