A US jury has sentenced Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death by lethal injection.
Three
people were killed and 260 were injured when Tsarnaev, now 21, and his
brother placed bombs at the finishing line of the Boston Marathon in
2013.
Tsarnaev
is likely to be moved to a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, to
await execution, but there could be years of appeals.
Victims sobbed as the sentence was read, but Tsarnaev showed no emotion.
"Now he
will go away and we will be able to move on. Justice. In his own words,
'an eye for an eye'," said bombing victim Sydney Corcoran, who nearly
bled to death and whose mother lost both legs.
After 14 hours of deliberations, the jury concluded that he showed no remorse and therefore should be put to death.
"The jury has spoken. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will pay for his crimes with his life,'' said US Attorney Carmen Ortiz.
Tsarnaev was found guilty last month of helping carry out the attack, as well as fatally shooting a policeman.
As a
state, Massachusetts ended the death penalty in 1984, but Tsarnaev was
tried on federal charges, meaning he was eligible for execution.
After
the sentence was announced, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said: "The
ultimate penalty is a fitting punishment for this horrific crime and we
hope that the completion of this prosecution will bring some measure of
closure to the victims and their families.''
But not all of the victims supported the death penalty for Tsarnaev.
The
parents of Martin Richard, an eight-year-old boy killed in the blast,
wrote an article in the Boston Globe newspaper last month asking the
government to not seek a death sentence as it would delay their
emotional closure.
Tsarnaev
stood next to his lawyer. He tilted his head to the side and shifted
his weight from one foot to the other as he heard the clerk read the
notes from the jurors.
After the death sentence was announced, he bowed his head.
A juror
with gold hoop earrings took a drink from a water bottle. A moment
later she started to cry. Another juror touched her to reassure her and
to comfort her.
Another
juror with dark-framed glasses and a blue shirt cried too. He took off
his glasses. He wiped his forehead and wiped his eyes. He bit his lips,
distraught.
The
Associated Press news agency reached Tsarnaev's father, Anzor Tsarnaev,
by phone in the Russian region of Dagestan on Friday. He moaned after
hearing the sentence and hung up.
During
the trial, Tsarnaev's defence team admitted that he had played a role in
the attacks but said that his older brother, Tamerlan - shot dead by
police in the subsequent manhunt - was the driving force.
Lawyers
also highlighted his difficult early life. The Tsarnaevs - ethnic
Chechens - had lived in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan and the
volatile Dagestan region of Russia, near Chechnya. The family moved to
the US in 2002.
But
prosecutors argued that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was an equal partner in the
attack, showing the jury a message he wrote on the boat where he was
arrested.
"Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop," it read.
Throughout
the trial, the jurors heard grisly testimony from bombing survivors.
They described seeing their legs blown off or watching someone next to
them die.
At the
start of the penalty phase, the prosecutors showed jurors a photo of
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev raising his middle finger to a jail cell security
camera months after his arrest.
"This is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev - unconcerned, unrepentant and unchanged," prosecutor Nadine Pellegrin said.
BBC
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