Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan plans for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to return to Massachusetts to face charges for crimes committed after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
Among the charges is the murder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Officer Sean Collier in Cambridge.
“When you come into Middlesex County and execute a police officer in the performance of his duties and assault other officers attempting to effect his capture, it is appropriate you should come back to Middlesex County to stand trial for that offense,” Ryan said in a statement published in The Boston Globe.
Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 counts in federal court and later sentenced to death on six counts, The Daily Free Press reported on May 16. These charges include the murder of Collier and carjacking, according to the verdict form.
In order to be tried on a state level, Tsarnaev would have to be transported back from Florence, Colorado, where he is currently being held in the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as ADX “supermax.”
Stanley Fisher, a professor at Boston University School of Law, said that even though Tsarnaev has already been convicted on a federal level, there is no legal reason he cannot also be tried on a state level.
“You might think to try him again would be double jeopardy, but that is not how the double jeopardy clause is interpreted,” Fisher said. “So there isn’t any legal bar to doing that, but I think it’s fairly unusual.”
Tsarnaev could see some differences in his sentence and where he might serve his sentence, Fisher said.
“There is no death penalty in Massachusetts, so he could not be sentenced to death for murder,” Fisher said. “He could be sentenced to life without parole, but the federal court would not release him to serve time in a Massachusetts prison.”
Fisher said state charges against Tsarnaev would only have an impact under unlikely circumstances.
“The only time it would have any impact would be if his federal charges were overturned and that’s almost impossible to imagine in this particular case,” Fisher said. “The other possibility would be in a future time if he were paroled or pardoned in federal prison.” Bringing Tsarnaev back to Massachusetts, Fisher said, could have more symbolic weight rather than “genuine concern about him being set free.”
“It is extraordinarily unlikely and I doubt that anyone in the Middlesex County DA’s office thinks these circumstances are likely,” Fisher said. “If these circumstances were to happen, he could be arrested and charged at that time because there is no statute of limitations in Massachusetts for murder.”
