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As the verdicts were announced, outside it hailed as if in biblical counterpoint, stark and fitting punctuation to the end of Boston's marathon endurance of the brutal crime, the brutal trial, and the brutal winter of 2015.Did I write "end"? This was a pause, not an end, a pause during which we take time to remind ourselves we are alive, during which we celebrated a second post-bombing Marathon. Now begins the play's more dramatic second act, the sentencing phase that could last for weeks, in which prosecutors will argue that Dzhokhar was a hardened terrorist committed to slaughter and destruction who deserves to die at the government's hands, while the defense will plead that he was a disturbed slacker from a disastrous family manipulated by his older brother and who deserves life in prison for his inexcusable crime.Let's be clear: If any crime merits the death penalty, it's this one. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will not be exonerated, not by DNA or anything else.
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Why does Boston oppose a death sentence for this ungrateful war refugee who spat in the face of his high school's motto, "opportunity, diversity, and respect"? I have heard a list of reasons. The Martins ask to be spared from the years of appeals, saying, "As long as the defendant is in the spotlight, we have no choice but to live a story told on his terms, not ours." Others make a developmental neurology argument: Dzhokhar was only 19 and easily manipulated by his older brother; the frontal cortex, which governs impulse control, isn't fully formed until the mid-20s. There's the don't-give-him-the-satisfaction/anti-terrorism argument: Execution would make him a martyr, just as he wanted, it would transform him into a terrorism recruitment poster instead of a deterrent. There's the vengeance argument: He'll suffer far more in a solitary federal supermax cell, "virtually living in a bathroom" of just a few square feet, " rotting in prison for the rest of his life," than he would through a quick escape through death. And there's the spiritual argument: We as a society are better served by mercy than by cruelty and vengeance—as the slain MIT officer Sean Collier's sister wrote, she "can't imagine that killing in response to killing would ever bring me peace or justice… enough is enough."In a democracy, justice is not for the victims; they can never be restored, their lives put back as they once were.
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