Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Fox News Sunday that prosecutors should seek the death penalty for Boston Marathon suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
“It should likely be a death penalty case under federal law,” she said yesterday.
Prosecution is expected to happen at the federal level and the most serious charge available to federal prosecutors would be the use of a weapon of mass destruction to kill people, which carries a possible death sentence. Massachusetts does not have the death penalty.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) also stated that he believed federal prosecutors should seek the death penalty for Tsarnaev during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday.
When asked by host Candy Crowley whether Tsarnaev should face capital punishment if he is found guilty, even though it is banned in the state of Massachusetts, Schumer replied “The federal law allows the death penalty.”
“This is just the kind of case that it should be applied to. In fact, the only other time it’s been used since ’94 is on Timothy McVeigh. And given what I’ve seen, it would be appropriate to use the death penalty in this case, and I would hope they would apply it in federal court.”
You can watch both clips below:
The portion about the death penalty begins at 6 minutes in the clip:
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