The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to reconsider the death penalty of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of killing three people and wounding hundreds more in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
A three-judge panel in the Boston-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit ordered last July in support of Tsarnaev's attorneys that the defendant's conviction in 2015 involved potential bias by the jurors, therefore vacating Tsarnaev's capital punishment.
Tsarnaev, a 27-year-old Kyrgyz-American man, will remain in prison for the rest of his life and be given a new penalty-phase trial, the appeals court ruled.
The ruling was appealed by the Justice Department last October, when former President Donald Trump was still in office. The department argued that Supreme Court justices should not allow the lower court to "have the last word" given the "profound stakes of the erroneous" ruling tossing out Tsarnaev's death penalty.
The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments of the case during its next term beginning in October, with a decision possibly coming by the summer of 2022.
The Supreme Court's decision pose a test of President Joe Biden's commitment to ending the federal death penalty. It's unclear what stance the Justice Department under Biden will take as relates to Tsarnaev's death sentence.
Tsarnaev's attorneys conceded during his trial that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, detonated two homemade bombs near the Boston Marathon's finish line in 2013, but said Tamerlan, who died in a shootout as police pursued the brothers, was the mastermind of the attack.
