The death penalty is wrong, always and everywhere, and a siutable punishment would be to let him stew in despair for sixty or seventy years. But the answer to the “how long” part of the question in the thread title is: “forever.” He will be dead forever.
*Wa**I ***ved. Get it right.
I am sick of dropping in to spend some time with the smartest, hippest people on the Internet and reading about people “waving appeals” and “waiving flags.”
Ah, they could just park him in general population in a max security federal prison. He’d probably shoot his mouth off to the wrong inmate and some lifer who already has 3 life sentences against him will resolve this issue in his own manner.
And if he goes to Heaven as an 80-year-old soul, what use would he have for those 72 virgins anyway? (And would they be 80-year-old souls too?)
The drawback to that is that at every stage of the appeal process he will be back in the news and the families of the victims will likely be brought back into the spotlight.
Far better to let him rot in a Supermax for the rest of his miserable existence.
So, a little better than one execution per decade.
I think that you need to rain in the snark!
I also wonder why death penalty appeals are so glacially slow. Okay, so Tsarnaev has two issues to appeal. He has an appeal of right to the First Circuit. He loses. The Supreme Court has discretionary review; they probably wouldn’t grant cert.
Then he has one (and only one) habeas in federal district court, and an appeal of right in the First Circuit (again). Possibly a discretionary cert at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Then he is done. That’s it. Assuming everything is upheld, why does the process take 20 years? Why does it even take two years?
But … I do waive flags.