The Trials of Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s Jurors
The Sixth Amendment guarantees a criminal defendant with U.S. citizenship the right to be tried before an “impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” By this amendment, a jury is meant to be representative of a cross-section of the community in which the crime in question occurred. But what happens when the community itself cannot be deemed impartial? Especially when that jury has the power to decide whether someone lives or dies? The trial of the presumed Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a U.S. citizen, exemplifies what happens at the confluence of these two questions.
The judge, prosecutors, and defense team slated to preside over Tsarnaev’s trial are currently in the final stages of selecting jurors for the case. The trial will take place in Boston, despite multiple requests by Tsarnaev’s defense team to relocate the proceedings elsewhere. His lawyers insist that he cannot get a fair trial in Massachusetts because many in the state were personally affected by the bombings and already presume his guilt. In their most recent change-of-venue request, the defense presented its analysis of over 1,350 juror questionnaires, which showed that 69 percent of potential jurors have a personal connection or allegiance to the marathon or people injured in the bombings. Among them, 68 percent already believe that Tsarnaev is guilty.
These percentages are most likely accurate representations of the Eastern Massachusetts community from which the jurors will be drawn. The Boston Marathon is an event with a huge public profile around the country, but particularly in Massachusetts. It’s New England’s most widely viewed sporting event, and second in the U.S. only to the Super Bowl. More than 500,000 spectators line the course every year, mostly from around Boston. Over 21,000 runners participated in the marathon in 2012 when the bombings occurred, many of them from the Massachusetts area. Nearly everyone in the Boston area seems to know, or at least know of, a runner or a spectator who was there.
These percentages would not be overly troubling if the jury was only ruling on Tsarnaev’s guilt. There is a preponderance of evidence to support his culpability, and it is virtually assured that he will be found guilty. When that happens, however, that same Massachusetts jury has another task before it: to decide whether or not Tsarnaev will receive the death penalty.
This jury is more likely to hand down such a sentence than a jury in another state might be due to the empathy that many Massachusetts residents feel with victims of the bombing. The Boston Marathon is not just the most highly viewed, but also arguably the most well-known and loved event in the state, based upon its long history and location in the center of the city. The marathon finish line on Boylston Street has become a symbol of Boston’s damaged psyche and its resilience, and though no jurors who have personal connections to victims will be allowed to serve, the feelings of hurt and sympathy have transcended the personal to become communal for many in the area.
In addition to the possibility of the jurors being swayed by this sense of communal injury based on their own experience, bringing it up and emphasizing its power will undoubtedly be a major tactic of the prosecution throughout the trial. The jurors will have to face the conflict of upholding their duty to the community as unbiased jurors while at the same time feeling a sense of duty they may feel to assuage that communal injury, perhaps through the vengeance and closure that a death sentence for Tsarnaev would impart. The jurors could be made to feel as though they are letting down their own community, the state and even America by not handing down a death sentence for Tsarnaev.
It’s likely that the jury that will decide Tsarnaev’s fate will be a more or less accurate cross-section of Eastern Massachusetts. And yet, this jury can almost certainly not be deemed impartial at the outset. The duty that many of them will feel to their community, conscious or not, has the potential to offset or even outweigh their attempts to impartially decide on a sentence. In a case such as this, the Sixth Amendment no longer holds, but rather contradicts itself. A case that would be difficult to try impartially anywhere in the country has been made even more difficult by the judge’s decision not to move the trial. Like the conviction, a death sentence for Tsarnaev is virtually assured.