Why Alleged Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, If Convicted, Deserves to Die

It began as an action movie, transformed into a slasher flick, and ended as a courtroom procedural. The criminal protagonists were despicable — though not in equal measure.

On July 30, 1978, the Tison brothers — Donald, 20, Ricky, 19 and Raymond, 18 — visited their father Gary in Arizona State Prison, where he was serving time for killing a prison guard. After the family had assembled in the designated visitor picnic area, the brothers popped off the cover of their ice chest. There was no food, just guns. All four of them — plus a fifth man, Gary’s cellmate Randy Greenawalt — escaped from the prison in Donald’s 1969 Lincoln sedan.

A day later, the horror show began. When the car got a flat in the Arizona wilderness, a 24-year-old marine sergeant traveling with his young family stopped to help. The gang seized and robbed the good Samaritans. Gary Tison then went a hideous step further and gunned down the whole family — from the sergeant right down to his 22-month-old toddler.

After the gang continued on with a senseless crime spree, the police caught up with the Tisons near Casa Grande, AZ. Donald died in the confrontation. His brothers Raymond and Ricky were caught. Gary escaped, but only for a few days: He died in the desert, slowly, from exposure.

If Gary Tison had survived the elements, the state of Arizona would have executed him. And it would have been right to do so. Very few crimes justify capital punishment. But slaughtering a family in cold blood is one of them. It is the sort of crime that leaves a black hole of fear and horror in everyone, and it demands a response that goes beyond a jumpsuit and a prison cell.

In one of his lesser known works, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith described the way such crimes make us feel: “As we enter, as it were, into [the victim’s] body, and in our imaginations, in some measure, animate anew the deformed and mangled carcass of the slain, when we bring home in this manner his case to our own bosoms, we [take on] the duty which we owe him … His blood, we think, calls aloud for vengeance. The very ashes of the dead seem to be disturbed at the thought that his injuries are to pass unrevenged.”

I am skeptical about pro-death penalty arguments based on theories of “deterrence.” Rational thinkers don’t murder two-year-old children. They do it because they are evil. And that is why we long to see these criminals die. Not because it will discourage others — that’s just a cover story we tell ourselves to maintain the pretense of rationalism. It’s because we want to return moral order to a horror-struck society by repaying blood with blood. Smith called this the “sacred and necessary law of retaliation,” rooted in nature.

No society should give in to this impulse as a matter of course. Capital punishment shouldn’t be something that conservative politicians or prosecutors brag about meting out in wholesale quantities. The currency of capital punishment is cheapened — and the case against it made stronger — when the state puts to death criminals who are merely in evil’s penumbra.

In his new book, The Death of Punishment (excerpted on this site this past week), self-described “retributivist” Robert Blecker makes the case for killing “the worst of the worst.” But that category can never include, say, a getaway driver who is convicted under felony-murder rules because his fellow conspirators killed a bank guard. Nor, Blecker argues in his book, would it include Gary Tison’s own sons. Evil as they were, they were not in the same category as their father. Indeed, this same point was argued (unsuccessfully) by the surviving sons all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice declared that it will seek the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who allegedly bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three people (including an eight-year-old child) and injuring 260. He has shown no remorse, and everything we know about the crime indicates that it was committed for no reason except to inflict random slaughter on the residents of a country that welcomed the Tsarnaev family as refugees.

It is the very definition of evil — no different from what Gary Tison did 36 years ago. And if convicted, Tsarnaev should pay with his life. “The very ashes of the dead” demand nothing less.

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.