Supreme Court Reinstates Death Penalty for Boston Bomber

The Supreme Court of the United States has reinstated the death sentence for surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

A federal appeals court overturned Tsarnaev's death sentence and vacated two of his many convictions in a controversial ruling two years ago. The court emphasized in its ruling that Tsarnaev would remain in prison for the rest of his life.

For some Democrats, that ruling didn't go far enough.

But now, Tsarnaev will find himself back on death row in the nation's most notorious supermax prison, ADX Florence.

NBC News reports:

The 6-3 decision rejected defense claims that the judge at Tsarnaev's 2015 trial improperly restricted the questioning of prospective jurors and was wrong to exclude evidence of a separate crime two years before the bombing. 

Tsarnaev was convicted of joining his older brother, Tamerlan, in planting and detonating two pressure cooker bombs at separate spots near the marathon finish line in 2013. The blasts killed three people and left hundreds of others with serious injuries.

In a second phase of the trial, the same jury recommended capital punishment for the deaths of the two people killed by the bomb the younger Tsarnaev placed. His older brother was killed in a shootout with police four days after the bombing. 

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit ordered a new sentencing hearing, ruling unanimously that U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. failed to allow enough questioning of potential jurors about how closely they followed extensive news coverage of the bombings.

The panel also concluded that Judge O'Toole should have allowed Tsarnaev's attorneys to bring up a 2011 triple homicide his older brother, Tamerlan, is suspected of having committed. The surviving Tsarnaev brother's defense team had hoped to bring it up to strengthen their claim that Dzhokhar was easily manipulated by his older brother.