Only a few months into office and President Joe Biden has his acorns in a nutcracker. The man has some deciding to do. Biden preached on his stern opposition of capital punishment and though he has yet to act on his promises the Supreme Court is about to put his alleged convictions to the test.
The Supreme Court wants to reinstate the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the famed Boston Marathon Bomber, and this is where Biden will need to either man up or wimp out. The appeal to reinstate was filed by the Trump administration during the final six months of Trumps’ presidency when 13 federal inmates were ordered to be executed.
Biden has a little time to get his ducks in a row since the case won’t go in front of the court until later this Fall so he has to indicate which way he is going to go, but the pressure is mounting. It’s interesting to note how Tsanaev’s original death sentence was pushed through by the Obama administration with nary a word out of Joe Biden who was kept out of sight anyway.
While the Supreme Court has the authority to reissue the death sentence in the case, as with any imposed death sentence, it remains with the president to schedule a death row inmate’s date of death. Biden could take the easy way out by never scheduling that date since, literally, nobody has the authority to make him do so. But too many eyes will be watching to see if the President is indeed the man of his word he claims to be.
Not taking action will speak poorly of him. If he indeed desires to abolish capital punishment in its entirety, this is his opportune soapbox. Tsarnaev’s original death sentence was later overturned by the federal appeals court due to allegations of the judge in the case not taking the proper steps to ensure an unbiased jury. Problem solved. There will be no jury this time.
At the beginning of Tsarnaev’s trial, his team of lawyers openly admitted that their client, along with his older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was guilty of detonating two bombs at the marathon on April 15, 2013. But they tried to say that Dzhokar Tsarnaev was more or less just being a kid brother and tagging-along. It was Tamerlan who plotted the entire scheme.
Of course, Tamerlan wasn’t around to confirm the story since he died of the gunshot wounds he received while fleeing the scene, so his little brother got hung with 30 charges. The charges included conspiracy, using weapons of mass destruction, and the death of a security cop from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who got caught in the crossfire.
Able to turn a death sentence into life imprisonment, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev now uncomfortably resides in a maximum-security Federal Correctional Complex located in Florence, Colorado, where he has shown absolutely no remorse for his crimes. In fact, he tried to sue the federal government for $250,000 over his treatment at the facility. He said it was “unlawful, unreasonable, and discriminatory.”
He wanted a quarter of a million greenbacks because he only gets to shower three times a week. But this isn’t the worst of it. The prison took his white baseball hat and bandana that he bought with his own money from the commissary. That ought to be worth something. The lawsuit had claimed he was in “mental and physical decline” as a result.
A couple of things are obvious here. At taxpayer’s expense, this unremorseful little twit who had way more to do with the bombing than he’s ever let on will get three squares a day as he continues to be an ignorant menace. Secondly, he doesn’t want to die. Okay. We get that. But the security cop’s wife didn’t want to be a widow either. And his kids loved their dad.
There is also the fact that the brother’s original intent was to maim and kill as many as they could, but they’re idiots so they thank God fell short of their mark. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is worthy of the death penalty. Undoubtedly more so than some of his fellow inmates, but now the ball is in Biden’s court. To fry or not to fry? That remains the question. Either way, Joe Biden loses.
