It's been nearly nine years since brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev detonated bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring scores of others.
Tamerlan died shortly after the bombings during a shootout with police. Dzhokhar has been facing the death penalty ever since.
And this week, the Supreme Court looks to have cleared the way for his execution:
The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing which led to the deaths of three spectators and a police officer, reversing a lower court decision.
The ruling was 6-3 along conservative-liberal lines.
"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. "The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one."
At issue was a lower court's having vacated the death penalty:
The justices' ruling reversed a federal appeals court that in 2020 had wiped away the death sentence for Tsarnaev and ordered a new penalty-phase trial. At the time, the lower court said that Tsarnaev would remain in prison for the rest of his life for an "unspeakable brutal act," but that the trial court had made mistakes regarding issues related to pretrial publicity, as well as the exclusion of evidence that might have helped Tsarnaev's case.
The lower court would appear to have been wrong, though doubtlessly the appeals process will drag on for an undetermined amount of time.
Of note, Tsarnaev is among the relatively few inmates to be housed at ADX Florence, a "supermax" compound that is arguably the most secure prison facility in the United States:
Each inmate is assigned their own 7-by-12 foot cell, where they spend roughly 23 hours alone each day. The cells (and everything in them, including the sink-toilet, shower, desk, and bed) are forged from concrete. It's reportedly soundproof; that way, prisoners can't communicate with others in their block by talking or tapping out codes. A slot in the door allows for meal delivery with little to no interaction between inmates and guards. Psychiatric evaluations, spiritual guidance, and other services are also provided through the door, or via telecommunication. A 2014 Amnesty International report on the facility found "that prisoners routinely go days with only a few words spoken to them..."
Each cell reportedly has a 4-inch-wide window. The angled slit cuts through the thick prison walls in such a way that inhabitants can't understand their own location in the complex. "You can't see nothing, not a highway out in the distance, not the sky," Travis Dusenbury, who spent 10 years in the prison's general population, told The Marshall Project, a non-profit criminal justice newsroom. "You know the minute you get there you won't see any of that, not for years and years."
Even if Tsarnaev succeeds in getting his death sentence commuted... he's still not going anywhere.
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