In a 6 to 3 opinion written by Justice Thomas, the Court held that the First Circuit improperly vacated Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence. See United States v. Tsarnaev, No. 20-443 (Mar. 4, 2022) (opinion here). Breyer dissents with an opinion joined by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor.
On April 15, 2013, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted and detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding hundreds. Three days later, as investigators began to close in, the brothers fled. In the process, they murdered a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer, carjacked a graduate student, and fought a street battle with police during which Dzhokhar inadvertently ran over and killed Tamerlan. Dzhokhar eventually abandoned the vehicle and hid in a covered boat. He was arrested the next day.
Although the Boston Marathon Bombing received intense and international media attention, during voir dire the district court declined to include a proposed question that asked each prospective juror to list the facts he had learned about the case from the media and other sources.
At sentencing, Dzhokhar sought mitigation based on the theory that Tamerlan had masterminded the bombing and pressured Dzhokhar to participate. In an attempt to show Tamerlan’s domineering nature, Dzhokhar sought to introduce the statements of Ibragim Todashev, who had alleged during an FBI interview that, years earlier, Tamerlan had participated in a triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts. The District Court excluded the evidence, and the jury concluded that 6 of Dzhokhar’s crimes warranted the death penalty.
The Court of Appeals vacated Dzhokhar’s capital sentences on two grounds. First, the court held that the District Court abused its discretion during jury selection by declining to ask about the kind and degree of each prospective juror’s media exposure, as required by that court’s precedent. Second, the court held that the District Court abused its discretion during sentencing when it excluded evidence concerning Tamerlan’s possible involvement in the Waltham murders.
The Supreme Court held the District Court did not abuse its discretion by declining to ask about the content and extent of each juror’s media consumption regarding the bombings. The Court of Appeals erred when it concluded that the District Court abused its discretion by failing to put Dzhokhar’s proposed media-content question to the jury.
Nor did the District Court abuse its discretion in excluding from the sentencing proceedings evidence of the Waltham murders. The Federal Death Penalty Act provides that, at the sentencing phase of a capital trial, “information may be presented as to any matter relevant to the sentence, including any mitigating or aggravating factor.” 18 U. S. C. §3593(c). But the district court may exclude information “if its probative value is outweighed by the danger of creating unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, or misleading the jury.” Ibid. Such evidentiary decisions are reviewed for abuse of discretion. Here, Dzhokhar sought to introduce evidence linking Tamerlan to the unsolved Waltham murders to support his mitigation defense that Tamerlan was the ringleader of the bombing. That evidence, however, did not allow the jury to confirm or assess Tamerlan’s alleged role in the Waltham murders. The District Court did not abuse its discretion when it reasonably excluded the evidence for its lack of probative value and potential to confuse the jury.
Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, said the Court of Appeals acted lawfully in holding that the District Court should have allowed Dzhokhar to introduce this evidence based on well established death penalty precedent. See Lockett v. Ohio, 438 U. S. 586, 604 (1978) (plurality opinion) (criminal defendant charged with capital crime has constitutional right to present “any aspect of [his] character or record and any of the circumstances of the offense that the defendant proffers as a basis for a sentence less than death”); Eddings v. Oklahoma, 455 U. S. 104, 110 (1982) (adopting Lockett’s plurality rule). Breyer's opinion did not reach the pretrial publicity issue because it would not have changed the outcome--vacating the death sentence.