Friday, February 7, 2014

Killing the killers: when are terrorists sentenced to death?


When US Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that federal prosecutors would seek the death penalty against 20-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — the surviving suspect allegedly behind the Boston bombings last April — news reports insinuated that the sentence might be likely, that Tsarnaev might be put to death.


But looking at Tsarnaev’s case in light of Timothy McVeigh — the last person in the US to be executed on federal terrorism charges in 2001 — it becomes harder to believe that the 20-year-old’s crimes will rise to the level of a capital offense. As one McVeigh expert put it simply to The Verge: "Tsarnaev is different."


‘He wouldn’t go away’


The stories of McVeigh and Tsarnaev have similarities. If the...


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