United States v. Tsarnaev
The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court decision that had thrown out Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence, ruling that the trial court made no legal errors in how it selected the jury or what evidence it allowed at sentencing.
The decision reinstates Tsarnaev's death sentences and, more broadly, limits the power of federal appeals courts to override a trial judge's management of jury selection by invoking their own procedural rules.
“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, affirming that constitutional protections were honored even for a perpetrator of mass violence.
How it got here: A federal trial court convicted Tsarnaev and sentenced him to death; the First Circuit vacated the death sentence on two grounds; the government petitioned the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan planted homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line on April 15, 2013, killing three people and wounding hundreds. The brothers also murdered a campus police officer and engaged in a violent chase with police before Tamerlan was killed and Dzhokhar was captured. Dzhokhar was convicted on all 30 federal charges and sentenced to death. During sentencing, he argued that Tamerlan had masterminded the attacks and dominated him — a theory he tried to support with evidence that Tamerlan had committed a separate triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts.
The question before the Court
Did the trial court in the Boston Marathon bombing case err by refusing to ask jurors what specific media they had consumed, and by barring the defense from presenting evidence at sentencing that the bomber's brother had committed a separate triple murder?
The Court's answer
No — the First Circuit was wrong to vacate Tsarnaev's death sentence on either ground, and the Supreme Court reversed.
On jury selection: the trial court had broad discretion over which questions to ask prospective jurors. Its decision to exclude a sweeping "list everything you've heard in the media" question was reasonable — the court explained the question was unfocused and probed knowledge rather than bias — and it ran a rigorous alternative process using a 100-question written form and three weeks of in-person questioning. The First Circuit had no authority to override that choice by invoking a mandatory rule of its own under "supervisory power."
On the Waltham evidence: the Federal Death Penalty Act allows wide-ranging mitigating evidence at capital sentencing but permits judges to exclude it when confusing the jury outweighs the evidence's value. Because all witnesses to the Waltham murders were dead, there was no reliable way to establish Tamerlan's actual role, and admitting the evidence risked an unmanageable mini-trial. The Eighth Amendment does not forbid such a ruling — it only bars absolute exclusion of entire categories of mitigating evidence, not individualized balancing under a permissive standard.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Tsarnaev's death sentence is reinstated. For the broader legal system, federal trial judges retain wide authority to run jury selection as they see fit in high-profile cases, and federal appeals courts cannot use claimed "supervisory power" to mandate specific questioning techniques that go beyond what the Supreme Court requires. Capital defendants also cannot automatically require admission of all potentially relevant mitigating evidence when a trial judge finds it unreliable or likely to confuse jurors.
What changes now
With the reversal, Tsarnaev's six death sentences are reinstated. No new sentencing hearing is required. The decision is a final resolution of the two issues the First Circuit had relied on to vacate those sentences. Tsarnaev remains on federal death row, and any further proceedings would require a separate legal challenge not addressed by this ruling.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly reserved whether courts of appeals have any supervisory power over district courts at all — a question Justice Barrett's concurrence flagged as open. The ruling also does not address whether more reliable mitigating evidence about a co-defendant's prior crimes would ever require admission, or whether Tsarnaev might have other grounds to challenge his sentence.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Barrett
Justice Barrett agrees the First Circuit erred — its mandatory media-content rule conflicted with Supreme Court precedents granting trial courts broad discretion over voir dire. But she writes separately to question whether courts of appeals have any supervisory power over district courts at all. Article III gives each court inherent authority over its own proceedings, but she sees no comparable constitutional basis for appeals courts to impose procedural rules on district courts. She does not resolve the question here but urges the Court to revisit it in a future case.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
“The extra time that close examination takes is part of the procedural price that a judicial system allowing the death penalty will inevitably exact.”Breyer explains why appellate courts apply close scrutiny in capital cases, even on routine procedural questions.
Justice Breyer argues the trial court abused its discretion by excluding the Waltham murder evidence. In his view, the evidence was probative, corroborated by multiple sources, and critically important — far stronger than any other evidence the defense had to show Tamerlan's violent, domineering nature. Death penalty proceedings require particularly careful review because the stakes are irreversible. He also notes that courts routinely admit uncharged prior-crime evidence for the government as an aggravating factor, and there is no principled reason to bar similar defense evidence in mitigation. He would have affirmed the order for a new sentencing. Sotomayor and Kagan joined except Part II-C, in which Breyer offered broader personal observations about the death penalty.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Sixth Amendment guarantees an impartial jury, but not an ignorant one. Trial courts have broad discretion over jury selection — including which questions to ask prospective jurors — and an appeals court can disturb those choices only if the trial court clearly abused that discretion, a standard that gives the judge significant deference.
- Here, the trial court reasonably declined to require each juror to list everything learned from the media. The court explained the question was unfocused, emphasized prior knowledge rather than bias, and risked generating unmanageable information of minimal value. It substituted a thorough alternative: a 100-question written screening form, three weeks of individualized in-person questioning, and clear jury instructions to decide only on evidence presented at trial.
- The First Circuit had required the media-content question under its own 1968 Patriarca rule, calling the trial court's failure to ask it 'an error of law.' But federal appeals courts cannot use claimed 'supervisory power' to create mandatory procedural rules that override or supplement legal standards already set by the Supreme Court — here, the well-established rule that trial courts have broad discretion over voir dire. The First Circuit's mandatory-question rule was an impermissible end-run around that standard.
- On the Waltham evidence: the Federal Death Penalty Act (18 U.S.C. § 3593(c)) creates a highly permissive regime at capital sentencing — normally inadmissible evidence is allowed if relevant — but still permits trial courts to exclude evidence whose risk of confusing the jury outweighs its probative value. Courts of appeals review such exclusions only for abuse of discretion, deferring to the trial judge unless the decision was 'manifestly erroneous.'
- The trial court's exclusion of the Waltham murder evidence was a reasonable exercise of that discretion. Because Todashev — the only person with direct knowledge — was dead, the evidence could not reliably establish what role Tamerlan actually played; the trial court found it equally plausible that Todashev, not Tamerlan, was the primary actor. Admitting it would have required a confusing, witness-free mini-trial about a separate, uncharged crime with little ability to test the truth.
- The Eighth Amendment does not override that result. The line of cases requiring sentencers to consider mitigating evidence (rooted in Lockett v. Ohio and Eddings v. Oklahoma) only bars an absolute cutoff of entire categories of mitigating evidence — it does not prevent the government from setting reasonable evidentiary limits or applying an individualized balancing test like § 3593(c)'s, which gave Tsarnaev every reasonable opportunity to present relevant mitigation.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Skilling v. United States (561 U. S. 358)
Reaffirmed as controlling authority that trial courts have broad discretion over jury selection in high-profile cases.
Reaffirms United States v. Payner (447 U. S. 727)
Reaffirmed to set the outer limit: supervisory power cannot be used to circumvent legal standards the Supreme Court has already established.
Distinguishes Lockett v. Ohio (438 U. S. 586)
Distinguished: Lockett bars absolute exclusion of mitigating evidence categories; it does not prevent individualized evidentiary balancing under § 3593(c).