Barrett Found Marathon Bomber Death Sentence Vote ‘Distasteful’

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she found it “distasteful” to affirm the death sentence of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev based on her personal opposition to capital punishment.

“I found the vote distasteful to cast, and I wish our system worked differently,” Barrett writes in a passage of her new memoir, according to an excerpt published by the Free Press. “Yet I had no doubt that voting to affirm the sentence was the right thing for me to do.”

Barrett’s memoir, “Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution,” is scheduled to be published Sept. 9. The Trump appointee will mark her fifth anniversary as a justice this fall.

The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote divided along ideological lines, in March 2022 reinstated a death sentence for Tsarnaev, who set off one of the bombs near the finish line of the 2013 marathon that led to the deaths of three people. Hundreds of others were injured.

The case reached the Supreme Court after an appeals court vacated the sentence and the Justice Department urged the justices to reverse that decision.

In the excerpt, Barrett writes that “the people who adopted the Constitution didn’t share my view of the death penalty, and neither do all my fellow citizens today.” She added the oath federal judges take “is a promise to leave personal preferences and biases at the courthouse door. The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice.”

Barrett recounted a conversation she had with a “favorite aunt” about the law and the role of the court. Barrett said the two are close despite holding different opinions across a broad set of topics.

The aunt will “openly say” she would have preferred Barrett’s seat to be filled by an appointee of a Democratic president, the justice wrote.

Barrett, who joined the court in 2020 following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, reportedly signed a deal for $2 million for the book.

She is scheduled to begin a book tour Thursday at a Free Press event in New York. She also has scheduled stops at the Nixon and Reagan presidential libraries, National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and Library of Congress’s National Book Festival in Washington.

In an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” as part of the tour, Barrett said, “I want Americans to understand the law, and that it’s not just an opinion poll about whether the Supreme Court thinks something is good or thinks something is bad.”

Asked by CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell about former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s claim that the high court will overturn the right to gay marriage as it did for abortion, Barrett said the court has to tune out what its outside critics say.

“People who criticize the court or who are outside say a lot of different things,” she said. “But again, the point that I make in the book is that we have to tune those things out.”

She is the latest justice to pen a book early in her tenure, something that’s proven lucrative for colleagues such as Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who reported making over $2 million off her memoir last year.

Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh have also signed book deals.