Matt Fecteau: Should Boston Bomber Tsarnaev be Condemned to Die?
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will likely die by lethal injection for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. With this recent ruling, it begs the question: should Tsarnaev be condemned to die? Better yet, does the death penalty still support our values?
Let me be clear, while I oppose capital punishment, I will not shed a tear for Tsarnaev. He methodically planned and executed a terrorist plot which resulted in a number of people killed, and hundreds maimed. Throughout the trial, he showed little or no remorse.
However, from the beginning, there were some concerns with the trial. While a federal trial, the people on the jury came from liberal, death sentence opposed Massachusetts. To be a member of this jury, he or she must be “death qualified” or consider the death sentence as an appropriate punishment. Anyone who disagrees with the death penalty must be excused from serving.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTWhile Massachusetts outlawed capital punishment, it is still the federal law of the land, but widely opposed in Massachusetts. An April 2015 Boston Globe showed less than 20% of Massachusetts’ residents supported the death penalty. Unfortunately, this was not reflected in the ‘death’ qualified jury pool.
Over the decades, capital punishment placed the United States on awkward footing aboard. The United States is the only industrialized country in the western world to have capital punishment enshrined into their criminal code. The United Nations’ Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon goes so far as to say, “The death penalty has no place in the 21st century.” Because of the length of time of between conviction and execution, in 1989, the European Court of Human Rights ruled this is the equivalent of torture.
The tension between the United States and Europe handicaps law enforcement. Some allies are ambivalent about cooperating with United States criminal investigations. Other European partners refused to extradite terrorist suspects because of disapproval with the death penalty.
Nevertheless, the United States does remain a member of an exclusive, but regressive, perverse group. The United States joins China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia with one of the highest judicial execution rates in the world each year.
Even with this high confirmed execution rate, it is not unheard for someone to be on United States death row for more than a decade. When the original death sentence was written into law, it took days to carry out the sentence. Now, it takes almost a decade, cruel indeed.
An economic argument can be made against capital punishment. Capital punishment can be quite expensive, up to 10 times more to kill someone. The actual execution is relatively cheap. The expense has much more to do with housing the inmate, and the associated legal costs. Fox News found death penalty verdict cases cost upwards of a million dollars more when compared to life sentence verdicts. This is money the federal government and states desperately could use.
Even though no dispute over Tsarnaev’s innocence, there are a number cases where – some utilizing the latest technology – inmates were found innocent. Since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 153 people have been exonerated and freed from death row, a cause for concern indeed.
We tend to think of life in prison as a lesser sentence, but life in prison is far more grueling. If sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Tsarnaev’s home would be the Supermax prison in Colorado. He would live in solitude, 23 hours a day, likely till death, a far graver penalty.
In sharp contrast, while sitting on death row, the victims and their families will have to suffer through the agonizing process of appeal after appeal reported in the news, reliving the pain each time. With life sentences, the process is much more expedited when compared to death sentences; criminals are convicted and never heard from again, receiving little coverage, if any.
A common justification for the death sentence is it deters, but empirical research does not support. "Do Executions lower homicide rates? The Views of Leading Criminologists,” Michael L. Radelet and Traci L. LaCock overwhelmingly back the conclusion death sentences do not deter individuals from committing heinous crimes.
In addition, Tsarnaev and people like him are indoctrinated to embrace death, not fear it. Aren’t we just making him a martyr? Tsarnaev sought to be killed in an alleged fight against the crusader United States, and now, he will get his wish.
More importantly, our enemies don’t value life. We do, and that’s what makes us different, but maintaining with the death penalty as a form of punishment, what does this say? Shouldn’t we examine other more effective types of punishment?
Matt Fecteau ([email protected]), of Pawtucket, lost to U.S. Rep. David Cicilline in last year’s Democratic primary. He was a White House national security intern and captain in the US Army with two tours to Iraq. Twitter: @MatthewFecteau
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