U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to seek the death penalty in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is bad news for opponents of capital punishment. Holder’s decision puts the abolitionist community in a bind.
Should those who oppose the death penalty protest this decision? Should abolitionists mount a campaign like the one mounted in 2001 when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was on trial for his life? Or like the one two years later when John Allen Muhammad, the so-called Beltway sniper, faced a death sentence after he killed 10 people and terrorized citizens of Maryland, Virginia and Washington? Should abolitionists now publicly mobilize in an effort to prevent Tsarnaev from being executed for his alleged act of domestic terrorism? Should they ask Americans to sympathize with his plight by reminding them that, despite the horror of his deed, Tsarnaev is a human with the capacity to love and be loved, to hope and fear, to cry and perhaps to change?
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