Parents say put Boston bomber behind bars for life

Days before a jury is scheduled to begin deciding whether to execute Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the parents of the youngest person to die in the Boston Marathon bombing urged federal authorities to consider taking the death penalty off the table.

In a front-page essay published Friday in the Boston Globe, Bill and Denise Richard called on prosecutors to drop the death penalty phase of Tsarnaev’s trial and bring the case to a close. Their 8-year-old son, Martin, was the youngest of the three people killed by the explosions at the marathon finish line and their 7-year-old daughter, Jane, lost a leg. The parents were among the 264 people injured in the April 15, 2013, attack.

“We understand all too well the heinousness and brutality of the crimes committed,” the Richards wrote. “We were there. We lived it. The defendant murdered our 8-year-old son, maimed our 7-year-old daughter, and stole part of our soul.”

But they went on to argue that ending the case would allow them and others to heal and rebuild their lives instead of having to live through years of inevitable appeals if the jury decides on the death penalty.

“We are in favor of and would support the Department of Justice in taking the death penalty off the table in exchange for the defendant spending the rest of his life in prison without any possibility of release and waiving all of his rights to appeal,” they wrote.

The essay comes as murder cases across the nation focus on whether and by what means convicted killers should be executed. Several trials, including Tsarnaev’s and the mass murder trial of James Holmes, accused in the 2012 movie theater rampage in Aurora, Colorado, are more about the defendant’s punishment than his guilt.

Complicating the death penalty debate is a series of botched executions in Ohio, Oklahoma and Arizona that have raised questions about the current lethal-injection protocol used to execute inmates.

Nationally, 32 states have a death penalty and some have recently sought alternatives to lethal injection, such as firing squad and gas chamber. A 2014 Gallup poll found that about 60 percent of respondents favored execution for a convicted murderer. Only once – in 1966 – has Gallup found that more people opposed the death penalty (47 percent) than favored it (42 percent). The high point of support for the death penalty was about 80 percent in 1994.

There is no death penalty for state crimes in Massachusetts. Tsarnaev was convicted on April 8 of federal charges.

The death penalty issue has split the survivor community in Boston. Relatives of other victims have said they support executing Tsarnaev.

A recent poll found that 58 percent in the greater Boston area support life in prison for Tsarnaev. That number increases to 61 percent when just city residents are counted, according to a WBUR-FM poll released this week.

“Over the last month, we’ve seen support for life in prison grow by about 10 points” in the Boston area, Steve Koczela, president of the MassINC Polling Group, which conducts surveys for WBUR, a public radio station.

According to the poll, only 31 percent of Boston-area residents said they supported the death penalty for Tsarnaev. That support drops to 26 percent in the city of Boston.

The earlier WBUR survey was conducted last month, while the first phase of the Tsarnaev trial was ongoing. The latest poll was conducted after he was convicted.