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USA: TSARNAEV FORMALLY SENTENCED TO 6 DEATH SENTENCES
June 24, 2015: U.S. District Judge George O'Toole formally sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to 6 death sentences for the April 15, 2013, bomb at the Boston Marathon.
The judge was required under the federal death penalty law to impose the May 15 jury's death sentence for an attack prosecutors said was carried out by Tsarnaev and his older brother,
Tamerlan, to retaliate for U.S. actions in Muslim countries. Tamerlan, 26, was killed during a getaway attempt days after the bombings. Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured when Tsarnaev and his brother placed two pressure-cooker bombs near the marathon finish line.
Tsarnaev broke his two years long silence. He apologized to the victims and their families. "I am sorry for the lives that I've taken, for the suffering that I've caused you, for the damage that I've done — irreparable damage," the 21-year-old former college student said, speaking haltingly in his Russian accent. Tsarnaev's apology was peppered with religious references and praise of Allah. He asked that Allah have mercy upon him and his dead brother.
Some bombing survivors saw his apology as disingenuous and incomplete. "After we heard it, we
wished we hadn't," said Lynn Julian, who suffered a traumatic brain injury and a back injury, and now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. "He threw in an apology to the survivors that seemed insincere," she said. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said Tsarnaev's statement was more noteworthy for what he didn't say. "He didn't renounced terrorism. He didn't renounce violent extremism," she said.
After Tsarnaev said his piece, Judge O'Toole quoted a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is often interred with their bones," he said. "So it will be for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev," the judge said, telling Tsarnaev that no one will remember that his teachers were fond of him, that his friends found him fun to be with or that he showed compassion to disabled people. "What will be remembered is that you murdered and maimed innocent people, and that you did it willfully and intentionally," O'Toole said. It could take years or even decades for Tsarnaev’s appeals to work their way through the courts. (Sources: Associated Press, Hands off Cain, 24/06/2015)
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