Had Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev been sentenced to life at a federal Supermax prison, his remaining years would have been spent in a tiny concrete cell, 23 hours a day, constantly alone, with barely a sight of the sky and none of the country. As punishment for crime goes, that might have been enough.
But more than punishment was at stake in the case of Tsarnaev...The bombing was no mere criminal act carried out on an especially large scale. Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan...carried out an act of war aimed at the institutions and values of American civic life.
The victims were unsuspecting and defenseless, and the damage done will be felt for decades. Think of the Richard family: Bill Richard, the father, eardrums blown and wounded with shrapnel; his wife Denise, who lost an eye; daughter Jane, who lost a leg; son Henry, unwounded but traumatized; son Martin, murdered at the age of eight.
No society serious about its self-defense and preservation can tolerate this.
There are strong arguments for and against the death penalty, and there is no doubt that innocent men have been killed by the state. But there is no doubt of guilt in this case. And whatever else one believes about the death penalty, it sends an unmistakable message that even a society as tolerant as ours still believes that some acts deserve the ultimate penalty.
We expect critics of the sentence to claim that the death penalty is exactly what Tsarnaev wants, as do his radical fellow travelers: martyrdom in the name of jihad. Maybe so, though we suspect those same fellow travelers would have interpreted a life sentence as a sign of American weakness and moral squeamishness.
What Tsarnaev may or may not want is not the issue. It never will be. What matters is that Americans, as a people, deliver justice to those who would destroy us. On Friday a jury of our peers delivered that justice.
As the WSJ states, "some acts deserve the ultimate penalty." And, yes, Tsarnaev clearly and unmistakeably fits into that class.
In my mind, any concern about the DP should focus on the process and criteria that are used (in any particular jurisdiction) to identify which murderers fall within that narrow class.
The varying and, in many instances, inconsistent jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction (county-by-county) determination of whether a particular murderer "deserve[s] the ultimate penalty" can, and should, be improved upon, with emphasis on the key phrase "some" in the WSJ editorial.