"The administration continues to believe the jury imposed a sound verdict and that the Court of Appeals was wrong to upset that verdict," Feigin said during a US Supreme Court session.
The government asks to respect the "sound judgement" of the jury, he noted, adding that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan murdered and injured a big number of innocent people.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who carried out a bomb attack on participants and spectators of the 2013 Boston Marathon alongside his older brother Tamerlan, was sentenced to death by a jury in 2015. Last July, however, the Boston-based First US Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the sentence, arguing that prospective jurors had not been questioned by the court about whether they had prior biases about the case before the trial began.
Feigin called on the Supreme Court to uphold the jury’s decision that Tsarnaev deserves capital punishment for his crime.
During the hearing, several Supreme Court justices pointed out that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, while undeniably involved in criminal activity, was under a serious influence of his brother Tamerlan.
The Supreme Court has submitted the case. However, there is no specific timeline for considering it, the court’s press office explained to Sputnik. "No one knows exactly when a decision will be handed down by the Court in an argued case, but in general, a case will be decided during the Term in which it is argued. The Court’s Terms usually end in late June," it said.
The Boston Marathon bombing killed three people and injured hundreds of others. Tamerlan was killed by police while on the run on April 19, 2013, while Dzhokhar was arrested the following day and sentenced to death by lethal injection in May of 2015.