Biden just commuted "most federal death sentences" — that is, 37 of them — but in all this mercy, he left 3 men doomed.

I'm reading "Biden commutes most federal death sentences before Trump takes office/Thirty-seven inmates will serve life without parole. Three others, involved in cases of 'terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder,' still face execution" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Who were the 3? 

Those he did not spare are: Dylann Roof, the white supremacist convicted of killing nine Black parishioners at a South Carolina church in 2015; Robert Bowers, who carried out the country’s deadliest antisemitic attack when he killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.

What made those 3 stand out in that collection of 40 murderers? Oddly enough, the link on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev goes to at 2020 article titled, "Death sentence overturned for Boston Marathon bomber." Bowers and Roof are alike in that their victims were chosen based on the group they belonged to and the killings took place in a house of worship. But what makes Tsarnaev like them?

What puts the 3 in one set is their fame. Anything else? Who were the 37 who received commutations? It's easier to spare nobodies.

Biden is, it seems, trying to rack up achievements. (Did you hear the one about the Equal Rights Amendment?) Should he be doing that after we've learned so much about how not there he is these days? His party has been voted out, he's already gone, and we don't know who is acting in his name. That's the real outrage here.

"The Supreme Court on Friday reinstated the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of helping carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. The vote was 6 to 3...."

The NYT reports. 

After the justices agreed to review it, the Biden administration pursued the case, United States v. Tsarnaev, No. 20-443, even though President Biden has said he will work to abolish federal executions and the Justice Department under his administration has imposed a moratorium on carrying out the federal death penalty.

Until July 2020, there had been no federal executions in 17 years. In the six months that followed, the Trump administration executed 13 inmates, more than three times as many as the federal government had put to death in the previous six decades....

Why fight for the death penalty and maintain a moratorium against it? It's valuable to preserve power, even the power that you don't currently want to use. A slightly different way to put that is: For Democrats, the best political position is to oppose Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in court — and indeed to retain the death penalty — but never to execute anyone.

"The Supreme Court said Monday it will consider reinstating the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev..."

The justices agreed to hear an appeal filed by the Trump administration, which carried out executions of 13 federal inmates in its final six months in office, including three in the last week of President Donald Trump’s term. The case won’t be heard until the fall, and it’s unclear how the new administration will approach Tsarnaev’s case. The initial prosecution and decision to seek a death sentence was made by the Obama administration.... Biden has pledged to seek an end to the federal death penalty, but he has said nothing about how he plans to do so.... In late July, the federal appeals court in Boston threw out Tsarnaev’s sentence because, it said, the judge at his trial did not do enough to ensure the jury would not be biased against him. The Justice Department had moved quickly to appeal, asking the justices to hear and decide the case by the end of the court’s current term, in early summer. Then-Attorney General William Barr said last year, 'We will do whatever’s necessary.'"

AP reports.

"The F.B.I.’s admission that it did not act on a tip that Mr. Cruz had a 'desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts,' could open up a new avenue of attack for political opponents seeking to discredit the bureau’s work...."

"After the shooting, conservative news media said that the F.B.I. could have prevented the attack if it had not been spending so much time looking into Russian election interference.... This is not the first time that the F.B.I. has come under fire for being aware of a threat and failing to stop an attack. Congress criticized the bureau for failing to stop the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, where the shooter was known to the F.B.I. The F.B.I. also knew of one of the brothers who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, but did not stop that attack. After those fumbles, F.B.I. investigators compared themselves to hockey goalies, who are fielding a relentless barrage of pucks. Sometimes, they said, they cannot keep things from making the net."

From "F.B.I. Was Warned of Florida Suspect’s Desire to Kill but Did Not Act" (NYT).

ADDED: Here's the FBI's statement. Excerpt:

The caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting. Under established protocols, the information provided by the caller should have been assessed as a potential threat to life. The information then should have been forwarded to the FBI Miami Field Office, where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken. We have determined that these protocols were not followed for the information received by the PAL on January 5. The information was not provided to the Miami Field Office, and no further investigation was conducted at that time.

"It’s good to normalize evil, in the sense of showing how otherwise 'normal' people and institutions can perpetrate evil acts..."

"... and every attempt should be made to do so. That’s how you prevent more evil from happening in the future."

Ah! I chose to blog this before I noticed the author, Jesse Singal. He's good!

He's writing about the reaction to that Atlantic article "My Family's Slave" (by Alex Tizon). Some people said that article shouldn't have been published. Example of the objection: "I am filled with nothing but anger and hatred at the vileness of the attempt by Alex Tizon to whitewash a slaveholder. No. FUCK! NO!"

Singal says:

In fact, it’s a common reaction just about any time a journalistic account of evil people or evil acts includes nuance and texture. Back in 2013, for example, some people were furious at Rolling Stone for running a cover image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in which the Boston Marathon bomber looked like… well, a normal kid. A handsome one, even. Some of the critics accused Rolling Stone of giving him the “rock star” treatment.

This “you’re normalizing evil!” critique didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now.

"If we were to start profiling people of 'Middle-Eastern' or 'brown' appearance, jihadists will simply recruit white Muslims from the Caucasus, like the Tsarnaev brothers..."

"... who struck at the Boston Marathon. In fact, al Qaeda has been trying to use our very prejudices against us for many years, which is why Osama Bin Laden recruited a 'white army of terror' from the huge number of converts that joined his cause. If it is only men we profile, jihadists will train women, such as the Chechens did with their Black Widows, or this latest Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino. Astoundingly, male jihadists have even cross-dressed in burkas to avoid capture. If it is any adult of fighting age that we screen for, jihadists have turned to grandmother suicide bombers and even animals laden with explosives."

Wrote Maajid Nawaz, whose Wikipedia page I'm reading after seeing him on TV talking about Brexit.

The New Yorker badly botches the juxtapostion of cartoon and text.

This is what I'm seeing at The New Yorker right now:



The article is a valuable, interesting piece by Patrick Radden Keefe called "The Worst of the Worst/Judy Clarke excelled at saving the lives of notorious killers. Then she took the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev." Seventeen of the Boston bombing victims are now amputees.

From a local news report on the trial:

"I heard 'please' and 'Martin' being uttered by Denise Richard," said Steve Woolfenden, who was lying on the pavement next to Martin and his mother after the second bomb exploded. "Just pleading with her son."...

Woolfenden's left leg had been sheared off below the knee. He described frantically trying to get his 3-year-old son, Leo, out of his stroller after he heard him screaming and saw he was bleeding from the side of his head. As he lay helpless on the pavement, he spotted Martin and Denise Richard.

What's missing from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's "I'm sorry."

Here's the full transcript. I'll boldface what stands out to me:

Thank you, your Honor, for giving me the opportunity to speak. I would like to begin in the name of Allah, the exalted and glorious, the most gracious, the most merciful, 'Allah' among the most beautiful names. Any act that does not begin in the name of God is separate from goodness.

Rand Paul on ending the bulk collection of phone records but keeping the NSA.

He impressed me in this section of an interview this morning on "Meet the Press."



From the transcript:

... I would have the NSA target their activities more and more towards our enemies. I think if you are not spending so much time and money collecting the information of innocent Americans, maybe could have have spent more time knowing one of the Tsarnaev boys, one of the Boston bombers, had gone back to Chechnya. We didn't know that even though we had been tipped off by the Russians, we had communicated, we had interviewed him and still didn't know that. Same with the recent jihadist from Phoenix that traveled to Texas and the shooting in Garland. We knew him. We had investigated him, we had put him in jail. I want to spend more time on people we have suspicion of and we have probable cause and less time on innocent Americans. It distracts us from the job of getting terrorists.

"I don't actually think the federal government will be executing people in 50 years."

"But if Barack Obama’s Department of Justice not only didn't stop using the federal death penalty, but also actively sought Tsarnaev’s execution, what are the odds that another, more liberal president will come along to do so in, say, the next 15 or 20 years?"

Asks lawprof Noah Feldman, who thinks that if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is actually put to death, "it will be a signal event in the history of" Massachusetts, "where I was born and have lived most of my life" and where "the death penalty has... come to seem distant, foreign and unfamiliar."

Even though "[a]lmost certainly, the execution won’t actually take place here."

Death for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The jury's verdict is in: death.

With death sentences, an appeal is all but inevitable, and the process generally takes years if not decades to play out. Of the 80 federal defendants sentenced to death since 1988, only three, including Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, have been executed. Most cases are still tied up in appeal. In the rest, the sentences were vacated or the defendants died or committed suicide.

The Tsarnaev verdict goes against the grain in Massachusetts, which has no death penalty for state crimes and where polls showed that residents overwhelmingly favored life in prison for Mr. Tsarnaev. Many respondents said that life in prison for one so young would be a fate worse than death, and some worried that execution would make him a martyr.

"They had time to feel pain, they had time to feel scared — but they had no time to say goodbye. And that is the very essence of terror."

Said U.S. Attorney Nadine Pellegrini, arguing that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev deserves the death penalty.

ADDED: Here's the federal statute enumerating the factors to be considered. I think this was the factor Pellegrini was getting at:

(6) Heinous, cruel, or depraved manner of committing offense.— The defendant committed the offense in an especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse to the victim.

"And what defense attorneys and prosecutors actually will be doing is fighting the penalty phase ahead of time — using every opportunity to push on the jury their own views of who Tsarnaev was."

"For the defense, that’s a likeable innocent kid who was led astray, and deserves to live. For the prosecution, that’s a cold-blooded, murderous jihadi who should be put to death."

"The United States has one big advantage... our Muslim populations — they feel themselves to be Americans."

"And there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition, that is probably our greatest strength. Now, it doesn't mean that we aren't subject to the kinds of tragedies we saw at the Boston Marathon. But that, I think, has been helpful. There are parts of Europe in which that's not the case, and that's probably the greatest danger that Europe faces, which is why as they... work with us to respond to these circumstances, it's important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems, but there also has to be a recognition that the stronger the ties of a... Frenchman of North African descent to French values, French republic, a sense of opportunity — that's gonna be as important, if not more important, in, over time, solving this problem."

President Obama (via Jaltcoh).

"By definition, killers like Tsarnaev are sociopathic and essentially dead inside."

"Consciously or subconsciously, they long for death. The State then rewards them by giving them the death penalty. I say, make him suffer; he deserves it. Make him live out his natural life in a cell, with no chance of freedom."

That's the top-rated comment at the NYT article "Boston Is Eager to Begin Marathon Bombing Trial, and to End It." The evidence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's guilt is overwhelming. The only point of going to trial is to determine whether he'll get life in prison without the possibility of parole or the death penalty.

[Tsarnaev's lawyer Judy] Clarke is famous for cutting deals that keep her clients off death row. At some point in the process, her clients — including Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber; and Jared L. Loughner, who killed six people in an assassination attempt on former Representative Gabrielle Giffords — pleaded guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison, with no chance of parole.

So far, Clarke has failed to get that deal for Tsarnaev.

Should the government give Tsarnaev the deal he seeks?

No. He deserves death.

No. We should see the full scale trial, with a jury deciding whether he deserves death.

Yes. He was very young and manipulated by his brother. Death is too harsh.

Yes. He deserves death, but the death penalty is morally wrong.

Yes. He deserves death, but deny him the drama and the sympathy that come with trial and execution.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: If you can't see buttons for voting in the poll, go here.

"He’s a young kid, and people will identify with him because of that. It’ll be in the media far more dramatically if he gets the penalty than if he doesn’t..."

"... and that’s a good argument for not giving him the death penalty.... He would become both a religious martyr, and a civil rights martyr." If, on the other hand, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is convicted and given a life sentence: "He will live in obscurity in jail and no one will remember him, not in two or three years."

Said Alan Dershowitz, an opponent of the death penalty, making the same points against the death penalty he would always make, and asserting "If [Tsarnaev] doesn’t get the death penalty then no one should."

Prosecutors announced yesterday that they are seeking the death penalty.

Do you agree with Dershowitz that what Tsarnaev is charged with doing is more deserving of the death penalty than anything else you can think of? Or do you think that's not exactly what Dershowitz is saying? Dershowitz thinks no one should get the death penalty, but we'd better have the guts to give it to baby-faced Tsarnaev, or shame on us for accepting the state's imposition of death on all the far less cute convicts at whose photographs we scarcely glance.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's multiple injuries.

"He was questioned for two days before this hearing, without being advised of his right to counsel. He was also being administered Diluadid, a potent pain killer, every three hours."

A much-criticized WaPo headline: "What motivates a lawyer to defend a Tsarnaev, a Castro or a Zimmerman?"

That still runs atop an article by lawprof Abbe Smith which explains the role of the defense lawyer within the criminal justice system. The explanation is familiar to anyone who's considered the topic beyond the shallowest level, but the article appears in the Washington Post because of all the attention to the Zimmerman trial, which explains the presence of the acquitted neighborhood watchman alongside the names of the evil Castro and the accused terrorist Tsarnaev.

The headline drew fire. At Breitbart.com: "the Washington Post outlandishly sought to equate the acquitted Robert [sic] Zimmerman to accused serial rapist Ariel Castro and Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev." At Instapundit: "Which one of these things is not like the others?... 'Tsarnaez = Castro = Zimmerman? Why not just throw in a Hitler? That’s usually how the question is posed at cocktail parties.'"

So look at how this article is teased on the front page at WaPo right now:



Quick! Roll out the Kaczynski!

Police photographer leaks pictures of bloodied, cornered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to counter the cute-boy pic on the cover of Rolling Stone.

The photographer (Sergeant Sean Murphy) deserves to be fired for that (and he might be; he's currently on suspension). 

These efforts to punish Rolling Stone for glamorizing the terrorist are playing Rolling Stone's game, promoting the magazine and boosting its image of edginess.

"Who knew Rolling Stone was the magazine for dreamboat terrorist cover boys?"

"Should rename it Tamil Tiger Beat."

ADDED: Back on May 16th, I wrote:

"Look at this Boston bombing. The pictures of those two brothers. Aren’t they cute?"

Said I, as quoted in The New Yorker today in a piece by Paul Bloom called "The Dzhokar Tsarnaev Empathy Problem." I was being sarcastic and criticizing the media for using a strikingly baby-faced picture of Tsarnaev in practically every report.