United States v. Tsarnaev

Facts

The Tsarnaev brothers, D and Tamerlan, immigrated to the United States in the early 2000s and lived in Massachusetts. Within 10 years they were actively contemplating how to wage radical jihad. They downloaded and read al Qaeda propaganda, and, by December of 2012, began studying an al Qaeda guide to bomb-making. On April 15, 2013, they planted and detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. They killed three and wounded hundreds many permanently maimed. Three days later, the brothers murdered a campus police officer, carjacked a graduate student, and fired on police who had located them in the stolen vehicle. D attempted to flee in the vehicle but inadvertently killed Tamerlan by running him over. D was eventually arrested and indicted for 30 crimes, 17 of which were capital offenses. For jury selection, the parties jointly proposed a 100-question form to screen the prospective jurors. The District Court adopted almost all of them, including many that probed for bias. Some questions asked whether a prospective juror had a close association with law enforcement. Others asked whether a prospective juror had strong feelings about Islam, Chechens, or the several Central Asian regions with which the Tsarnaevs were connected. Still, others asked whether the prospective juror had a personal connection to the bombing. Several probed whether media coverage might have biased a prospective juror. One question asked if the prospective juror had “formed an opinion” about the case because of what he had “seen or read in the news media.” Others asked about the source, amount, and timing of the person’s media consumption. Still, another asked whether the prospective juror had commented or posted online about the bombings. One question asked each prospective juror to list the facts he had learned about the case from the media and other sources. Concerned that such a broad, “unfocused” question would “cause trouble” by producing “unmanageable data” of minimal value that would come to dominate the entire voir dire, the District Court declined to include it in the questionnaire. The court called 1,373 prospective jurors for the first round of jury selection. After reviewing their answers to the questionnaire, the court reduced the pool to 256. D renewed his request that the court ask each juror about the content of the media he had consumed. The District Court again refused but permitted counsel to ask appropriate followup questions about a prospective juror’s media consumption based on the answers to questions in the questionnaire or at voir dire. D's attorneys followed up with several prospective jurors. After three weeks of in-person questioning, the District Court and the parties seated 12 jurors. The jury returned a guilty verdict on all counts. P argued that D’s crimes warranted the death penalty. D claimed that Tamerlan, D's older brother, masterminded the bombing and pressured D to participate. D sought to introduce hearsay evidence of a crime Tamerlan allegedly had committed years earlier. Tamerlan supposedly had hatched a plan to rob three victims of drug proceeds on the night of September 11, 2011.After taking the money, Tamerlan insisted on killing the three men. According to the other participant, Todashev, after he disagreed, Tamerlan told him to wait outside while Tamerlan cut their throats with a knife. The agents offered Todashev a pen and paper to write out his confession. Todashev instead attacked the agents, who killed him in self-defense. The FBI later used Todashev’s statement [to obtain a search warrant for a follow-on search of Tamerlan’s car. There were still many wisps of evidence that pointed to Tamerlan in the killing of the three men. P filed a motion in limine to exclude any reference to the Waltham murders and the motion was granted. D was sentenced to death. The Court of Appeals vacated D’s capital sentence. It held that the District Court abused its discretion during jury selection by declining to ask every prospective juror what he learned from the media about the case. This action was mandated by the court's discretionary supervisory powers, not as a matter of constitutional law. The District Court also abused its discretion when it excluded from sentencing the evidence concerning Tamerlan’s possible involvement in the Waltham murders. The panel believed that the evidence was sufficiently probative of Tamerlan’s ability to influence D. P appealed. 

Issues

Rule of Law

Holding and Decision

Legal Analysis

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