Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by a US jury on Friday for helping carry out the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded 264 others in the crowds at the race’s finish line.
After deliberating for 15 hours, the federal jury chose death by lethal injection for Tsarnaev, 21, over its only other option: life in prison without possibility of release.
The same jury found Tsarnaev guilty last month of placing a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs on April 15, 2013, as well as fatally shooting a policeman. The bombing was one of the highest-profile attacks on US soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Prosecutors described Tsarnaev, who is an ethnic Chechen, as an adherent of al Qaeda’s militant Islamist views who carried out the attack as an act of retribution for US military campaigns in Muslim-majority countries.
The jury’s decision does not mean Tsarnaev will face imminent death.
Defence attorneys are likely to appeal the sentence, a process that can stretch out for many years.