Most Boston residents oppose death penalty for Marathon bomber Tsarnaev: poll
A majority of Boston residents believe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should not receive the death penalty for his admitted role in the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, according to a new poll released Monday.
The survey conducted for WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, found that most Boston residents polled — 62 percent — said Tsarnaev should be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted. Twenty-seven percent said he should receive the death penalty.
The poll comes as the prosecution is expected to wrap up its case within days in the first phase of Tsarnaev’s federal death penalty trial in Boston. A jury will first decide whether Tsarnaev is guilty before moving on to the penalty phase of the trial, when they will determine whether he lives or dies for his role in the April 2013 bombings, which killed three and injured nearly 300.
This is not the first survey to suggest Boston residents prefer a life sentence for Tsarnaev. A September 2013 Boston Globe poll found that 57 percent of Boston residents favored sentencing Tsarnaev to life without parole over the death penalty for his role in the attacks.
But the WBUR poll is the first conducted since Judy Clarke, Tsarnaev’s attorney, admitted her client’s role in the bombings. “It was him,” Clarke said in her opening statement earlier this month.
It is also the first poll conducted since the city has relived some of the grisly details of the attacks during the first three weeks of the trial, including gruesome photos and surveillance video of the aftermath of the bombings and heart-wrenching testimony from survivors.
Tsarnaev, 21, is accused of plotting and carrying out the deadly bombings along with his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a confrontation with police four days after the attack. The brothers are also accused in the shooting death of Sean Collier, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, while on the run from police. While not disputing his role in the crimes, Tsarnaev’s defense team has cast its client as a troubled kid who came under the sway of his radicalized older brother in an attempt to save his life.
Tsarnaev’s attorneys unsuccessfully pushed several times to move the case out of Boston, arguing that their client could not receive a fair trial in a city where many are still struggling to recover from the emotional and physical toll of the bombings.
But many have considered the government’s decision to pursue the death penalty against Tsarnaev an uphill case in Massachusetts, where capital punishment was outlawed on the state level in 1982 and where a majority of the population opposes it on moral or religious grounds.
The WBUR poll questioned 229 registered voters in Boston with a margin of error of plus or minus 6.5 percent.
