Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: at least a decade of appeals to follow death sentence

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/15/dzhokhar-tsarnaev-death-sentence-marathon

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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has become the 62nd inmate on federal death row after he was sentenced to death on Friday for his part in the Boston Marathon bombings.

He will now join the rarified group of men and women (two are female) awaiting execution on federal death row; at 21 he will be the youngest.

Related: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sentenced to death

But despite the dramatic news from the Boston courtroom on Friday, Tsarnaev’s fate will take years to reach its conclusion. Many of his new federal death row peers have been sitting waiting for the appeals process to work its way out for more than 20 years.

Though the Justice Department could attempt to fast-track executions in the name of public interest, death penalty experts expect the very quickest timeframe from Friday’s sentence to Tsarnaev actually being put on a gurney and injected with lethal chemicals would be at least 10 years. The prisoner’s team of legal defenders, led by Judy Clarke, have already indicated two strong lines of likely appeal: that on prejudicial grounds the trial should never have been held in Boston where the bombings happened; and that the defense was given insufficient time to mount a full argument in mitigation that might have convinced the jury to spare Tsarnaev from the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Most capital cases in the US are handled by individual death penalty states, mainly in the deep south, while the involvement of the federal government in America’s most controversial judicial practice has become increasingly unusual in modern times.

Although a total number of 340 prisoners have been executed by the US government since 1790, in the past 50 years only three have died: Timothy McVeigh in June 2001 for the Oklahoma City bombing; Juan Raul Garza, also in 2001, for a triple drug murder; and convicted rapist and murderer Louis Jones two years later.

One of the paradoxes about federal death row is that being the responsibility of the US government, it might be assumed to have a national logic in terms of the types of crimes and regions of the country in which it is deployed. But in fact capital punishment has been even more maverick in its application federally than by individual states.

Almost half of Tsarnaev’s new federal death row peers were put there by just three states: Texas, which has put 11 prisoners there; Missouri, nine; and Virginia, seven. A further 13 states have one inmate each.

Very few of those individuals fall into the same category as the Boston Marathon bomber, whose involvement in extreme acts of public violence or domestic terrorism brought a genuinely nationwide spotlight on them. Most of the 62 inmates were put there for reasons that seem almost tangential – maybe a murder was conducted on federal land, or the gun used in a shooting was carried across state lines.