Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and several other top Democrats are leaning in favor of the death penalty for the surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev , according to their statements Sunday.
Schumer was part of a panel of Senators who participated in today’s CNN State of the Union with Candy Crowley during which he compared Tsarnaev to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the 1995 crime by lethal injection in 2001: “Given the facts that I’ve seen, it would be appropriate to use the death penalty in this case and I hope they would apply it in federal court.”
Massachusetts doesn’t allow the death penalty under their state law, and Boston Mayor Tom Menino stopped short of saying that Tsarnaev should be executed … but he hinted that he’d wouldn’t shed too many tears for the terrorist if he was: “I hope that the U.S. attorney, Carmen Ortiz, takes him on the federal side and throws the book at him.”
Massachusetts interim Sen. William “Mo” Cowan (D-MA) is the interim senator who was appointed to the office by Gov. Deval Patrick after John Kerry resigned to serve as US Secretary of State. Appearing on the State of the Union panel with Schumer, he said that he himself didn’t advocate the death penalty.
“I’ll leave it to Attorney General Holder to decide ultimately what needs to be done here. And I’ll support that,” Cowan said.
Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) seemed to agree with Schumer’s stronger stand. She told Fox News: “I think there’s going to be a great deal of evidence put together to be able to convict him, and it should likely be a death penalty case under federal law.”
Feinstein chairs the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee.
She also pointed out that the 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became a US citizen on September 11, 2012. That means that he’s subject to US federal law. Ironically, his birthplace Kyrgyzstan abolished the death penalty in June 2007.
[Senator Chuck Schumer photo by lev radin / Shutterstock.com ]
