United States v. Tsarnaev
The Supreme Court reinstated the death sentence of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ruling that the trial judge did not commit any serious errors — either in how he questioned potential jurors about news coverage, or in blocking evidence about Tsarnaev's brother's alleged role in a separate triple murder.
The decision also reins in federal appeals courts that had used their own self-declared 'supervisory authority' to impose procedural requirements on trial courts, holding that appeals courts cannot use such power to override standards the Supreme Court has already set.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one.”
The majority's closing statement reinstating the death sentence.
How it got here: The federal trial court convicted Tsarnaev and sentenced him to death; the First Circuit vacated the death sentences; the government petitioned the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
On April 15, 2013, brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding hundreds. Days later, they murdered a campus police officer before a confrontation with police in which Tamerlan was killed. Dzhokhar was arrested and convicted of 30 federal crimes. At sentencing he argued he deserved leniency because his older brother masterminded the attack and dominated him into participating.
The question before the Court
Did the trial judge in the Boston Marathon bombing case make serious enough errors during jury selection and sentencing to throw out Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court reinstated Tsarnaev's death sentence, ruling the trial judge made no reversible error in jury selection or sentencing.
On jury selection, the judge reasonably declined to ask each prospective juror to list what they had read or seen in the news, relying instead on a 100-question screening form and three weeks of individual questioning focused on detecting bias. Federal appeals courts cannot mandate specific voir dire questions by invoking "supervisory authority," because that power cannot override the Supreme Court's settled rule giving trial judges broad discretion in managing jury selection.
On sentencing, the judge properly excluded evidence about Tamerlan's alleged involvement in a 2011 triple murder. Because every witness to those events was dead, the evidence could not reliably show what role Tamerlan actually played and risked derailing sentencing with a confusing side-trial about unrelated crimes. The Federal Death Penalty Act allows judges to exclude evidence when jury confusion outweighs its value, and this exclusion fell well within that authority.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Tsarnaev's death sentence now stands. More broadly, trial judges in high-profile federal cases keep wide latitude over how they screen jurors and what evidence they admit at sentencing — and federal appeals courts cannot impose stricter rules of their own by invoking vague claims of supervisory authority over the courts below them.
What changes now
Tsarnaev's death sentences are reinstated and the First Circuit's vacatur is undone. Because the Supreme Court reversed rather than remanded, no new sentencing proceeding is required. The case is effectively over on the merits. The concurrence's call to reconsider whether courts of appeals have any supervisory authority over district courts remains an open question for a future case.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly left open whether courts of appeals have any supervisory power over district courts at all — only that such power cannot override standards the Supreme Court has already set. The Court also did not address the First Circuit's separate jury-selection rationale beyond the supervisory-power question, and did not reconsider the Eighth Amendment's application to the death penalty more broadly.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Barrett
Justice Barrett agreed that the First Circuit erred because its Patriarca rule conflicted with Supreme Court precedent giving trial judges broad discretion over jury selection. But she wrote separately to express deeper skepticism: courts of appeals may not have any supervisory authority to impose procedural rules on district courts in the first place. Article III designates this Court as 'supreme' over inferior courts, giving at least an arguable basis for the Supreme Court's own supervisory power — but no comparable constitutional hook exists for the courts of appeals. She urged the Court to revisit its past dicta on this question.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
“It is a death penalty proceeding. And where death is at stake, the courts (and Congress) believe that particular judicial care is required.”The dissent explaining why appellate courts scrutinize capital evidentiary decisions more closely.
Justice Breyer would have affirmed vacatur of the death sentence because the District Court abused its discretion in excluding the Waltham murders evidence. He argued the evidence was corroborated, probative of Tamerlan's dominant and violent character, and critically important to Tsarnaev's only real defense — that his brother pressured him into the bombings. Because death penalty proceedings require particular judicial care, Breyer would have applied abuse-of-discretion review more rigorously. He also noted that prosecutors routinely introduce similar unproved prior-bad-act evidence in aggravation without the same scrutiny. Part II-C, not joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, reflects Breyer's broader concerns about the death penalty system.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with jury selection. Under the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of an impartial jury, trial judges have broad discretion to decide what questions to ask prospective jurors, and appeals courts may overturn those choices only for 'abuse of discretion' — meaning a clearly unreasonable decision, not merely a debatable one. This deference is especially strong for pretrial-publicity questions because the trial judge sits in the community where coverage ran and can personally assess its depth.
- Applying that standard, the Court found no abuse of discretion. The District Court used a 100-question screening form (including questions about media sources and whether coverage had formed an opinion about guilt), followed by three weeks of individual questioning during which both sides could probe for bias. Excluding one broad 'list what you learned from the news' question — which the judge reasonably found unfocused and likely to produce unmanageable data — was a sensible judgment call, not a legal error.
- The First Circuit had used its own 1968 precedent (Patriarca) to declare that trial courts must ask media-content questions in high-profile cases, calling failure to do so a legal error and therefore an automatic abuse of discretion. The Supreme Court rejected this. Under United States v. Payner (1980), courts of appeals cannot invoke 'supervisory authority' to create prophylactic rules that circumvent or supplement legal standards already set by the Supreme Court. Because the Supreme Court had already established broad trial-court discretion over voir dire, the First Circuit's mandatory rule was impermissible.
- On the sentencing evidence, the Federal Death Penalty Act (FDPA) — the federal law governing how death sentences are decided — allows wide admission of evidence at capital sentencing but lets trial courts exclude it when the risk of jury confusion or unfair prejudice outweighs its probative value. This too is reviewed only for abuse of discretion.
- The District Court reasonably concluded that evidence linking Tamerlan to the Waltham murders lacked probative value and risked a confusing mini-trial: all witnesses to those events were dead, leaving no way to determine what role (if any) Tamerlan actually played. The evidence was just as consistent with Tamerlan being a minor actor as the ringleader. Admitting it would have required Tsarnaev to prove, without any surviving witnesses, what happened in a separate crime two years earlier before he could use it to argue for leniency in the bombings.
- Tsarnaev's Eighth Amendment challenge — that §3593(c) is unconstitutional if it allows exclusion of any relevant mitigating evidence — failed as well. The Court read its prior rulings in Lockett v. Ohio and Eddings v. Oklahoma as prohibiting only the categorical exclusion of entire classes of mitigating evidence, not individualized balancing of specific pieces of evidence. Section 3593(c) runs an individualized balancing test that gives defendants every reasonable opportunity to present mitigation, so it does not violate the Eighth Amendment.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Skilling v. United States (561 U. S. 358)
Confirmed as the governing rule that trial courts have broad discretion to manage jury selection in high-profile cases.
Reaffirms United States v. Payner (447 U. S. 727)
Reaffirmed that courts cannot use supervisory authority to circumvent legal standards the Supreme Court has already established.
Distinguishes Lockett v. Ohio (438 U. S. 586)
Distinguished: Lockett bars categorically excluding classes of mitigating evidence; individualized balancing under §3593(c) is constitutional.