Vox Sentences: Boston Marathon bomber gets the death penalty

"The first step on a long road"

(Mario Tama/Getty Images)

• A jury has sentenced Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• It deliberated for 14 hours over three days before announcing the decision.

  [CBS News / AP]

• Tsarnaev is the 62nd federal prisoner on death row. However, the federal government hasn't executed anyone for over a decade.

  [Washington Post / Adam Goldman]

• And the Obama administration has imposed a de facto moratorium on the practice while it reviews the procedure by which the federal government administers lethal injections.

  [NYT / Peter Baker]

• Tsarnaev's defense team, led by veteran death penalty defense lawyer Judy Clarke, had argued his brother Tamerlan — who died after a shootout with police — was the true mastermind of the attacks, and Dzhokhar was merely going along with his brother's plan.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The family of one of the three people killed in the attack — 8-year-old Martin Richard — asked the federal government to stop seeking the death penalty, citing the continued publicity the appeals process would bring to them. It's unclear if the jury saw the letter.

  [Washington Post / Mark Berman]

• Juries in capital cases exclude potential jurors who are opposed to capital punishment, which might bias juries in favor of conviction and execution.

  [Bloomberg View / Noah Feldman]

• Expect plenty of appeals by Tsarnaev seeking to get his sentence reduced. As death penalty expert Eric Freedman told NYT, "this is only the first step on a long road."

  [NYT / Katharine Q. Seelye]

For it then before you were for it now before you were against it now

(Laura Segall/Getty Images)

• So this Jeb Bush situation has been brewing for a few days.

• The controversy concerns his comments to Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Monday that, knowing what he knows now, he would've still gone to war in Iraq had he been president in 2003.

  [Fox News / Megyn Kelly]

• Bush quickly clarified that he'd misheard Kelly, and thought she'd asked if he'd have gone to war knowing what the White House knew then.

  [NYT / Maggie Haberman]

• Ezra Klein: believing Bush misinterpreted the question is the only way the interview made sense. But the war was still a bad idea knowing what we knew at the time.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• In any case, the next day Bush refused to say what he would've done: "I don't know what that decision would have been, that's a hypothetical. The simple fact is that mistakes were made."

  [Washington Post / Philip Bump]

• On Wednesday he dodged again and said that indulging hypotheticals "does a disservice" to troops who died in the war.

  [ABC News / Michael Falcone]

• On Thursday, he gave a seemingly definitive answer: "If we're all supposed to answer hypothetical questions—knowing what we know now, what would you have done—I would have not engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq."

  [National Journal / Matt Berman]

• But literally right after saying that, he continued, "That's not to say that the world is safer because Saddam Hussein is gone. It is significantly safer."

  [NPR / Domenico Montanaro]

• Basically every other Republican contender — Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, John Kasich — has said they wouldn't have invaded knowing what they know now.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Rand Paul went further and said he wouldn't have invaded knowing what he knew then.

  [Washington Post / Jose DelReal]

• Even former (George W.) Bush administration officials are baffled by Jeb's asnwers.

  [BuzzFeed / McKay Coppins]

• Don't expect the rest of the field to be any less hawkish, despite their answers on this. Rubio, for one thing, is being advised by a bevy of neoconservatives, including convicted criminal Elliott Abrams.

  [Mother Jones / Pema Levy]

Misc.

• Should Uber users get a tax break?

  [The Hill / David McCabe]

• Once upon a time, Xiao Feng was playing too much World of Warcraft. So his father hired WoW hitmen to go and kill his character.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• A number of Congressional offices don't let female staffers spend one on one time with the Congressman or Senator, a policy which may be illegal.

  [National Journal / Sarah Mimms]

• At least 80 percent of gun homicides in the US aren't gang-related.

  [Huffington Post / Evan DeFilippis]

• Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) is proposing an Earned Income Tax Credit for California, which is something more states really ought to do.

  [LA Times / Chris Megerian]

Verbatim

• "As for the mayor who was partly responsible for this DIY, youth-run venue that played host to bands like Fugazi and opened the same month that Husker Du released Candy Apple Grey: It was her husband, Bernie Sanders, now a Vermont Senator and Democratic candidate for president in 2016."

  [Vice / Paul Blest]

• "Many people cannot distinguish between their ‘all-things-considered’ moral judgment and their unmediated gut feelings, mistaking reflex revulsion for ethical insight."

  [Aeon / Julian Baggini]

• "Hackathons are technological Woodstock."

  [Fouad Matin to California Sunday Magazine / Nellie Bowles]

• "Zero tolerance doesn’t work. It just fucking doesn’t."

  [David Simon]

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