In Boston, the Justice Department is pressing judges to uphold Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence. In New York, it’s asking jurors to impose the death penalty on a man who killed eight people in an attack on a bicycle path.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment but has taken no major steps to that end. The Justice Department continues to press for the death penalty in certain cases, even though it has imposed a moratorium that means no federal executions are likely to happen anytime soon.
In a Tuesday filing, federal prosecutors said they won’t seek it for Patrick Crusius, a 24-year-old accused of fatally shooting nearly two dozen people in a racist attack at a West Texas Walmart in 2019.
Advocates for abolishing capital punishment say mixed signals from the administration and silence from Biden — the first president to have openly opposed the death penalty — drives home that the Democrat has not made good on his campaign promises that so raised their hopes.