Infamous Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s trial jury selection launched in the first week of January and testimony is in the first week of March. Just when we assumed that the entire process was in the verge of climax and all that remained was to consider whether to put Tsarnaev to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole, Dead Man Walking episode transpired.
Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph and well known by a lot of Americans as Oscar winning actress Susan Sarandon, from the 1995 film “Dead Man Walking”, tagged in. It’s surprising to say the least since Sister Helen, even though a celebrity in the anti-death penalty movement, is not known for testifying in death penalty cases. Somehow she wanted in on this one.
Now it is up to Judge George O’Toole to decide whether the 76-year-old Roman Catholic nun should be allowed to testify to save a 21-year-old Islamic extremist from death, considering the fact that she stands an icon of the anti-death penalty movement.
Sister Helen is known to be against death penalty for moral grounds as she firmly believes that people should be considered more than the worst act of their entire lives.
As righteous and dignified her belief is it is irrelevant since all the jurors have to swear that they were not morally opposed to the death penalty to be seated in Courtroom 9 of the Joe Moakley federal courthouse to begin with.
Along with Sister Helen Catholic bishops in Massachusetts also opposed the death penalty for Tsarnaev. According to them the defendant has already been neutralized and will never be able to cause harm.
Last month, he was found guilty of being involved in the incident, which left three people dead and more than 260 injured. According to Tsarnaev’s lawyers he took part in the bombing in 2013, but his older brother, Tamerlan, was the mastermind behind the operation and Tsarnaev was manipulated into joining. However, according to the prosecutors he is an equal partner in crime who deliberately put a bomb behind a family, killing an eight-year-old boy, Martin Richard, and causing his sister, Jane, to lose a leg.
After the federal government rebooted the death penalty program in 1988, the government sought death penalty in nearly 500 cases. Guilty verdict was found in 232 cases, jurors chose death in 79 cases. Out of 79, only three have been executed. There is a possibility that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would be No. 4 if the jury sentences him to death.
