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Four days before a jury sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his role in the 2013 Boston marathon bombing, the United States was roundly criticized by dozens of countries for using the death penalty.

At last Monday’s Universal Periodic Review, a process through which each United Nations member country has its human rights record periodically reviewed by other member countries, 36 countries called for the US to reconsider its use of capital punishment. The US, a country that carried out among the greatest number of executions in 2014, is one of a dwindling number of countries that use the death penalty.  

The death penalty is at odds with the primacy of human dignity and the right to life. It is inherently cruel and irreversible. In the US, its imposition is inseparable from issues of race and poverty. Also, the US’s criminal justice system is fallible – since 1973, 153 death-row inmates have been exonerated.

Beginning in 2007, the UN General Assembly has endorsed a world-wide moratorium on the use of the death penalty. Eighty-one countries have ratified a treaty abolishing the practice. Friday’s verdict not only went against this international trend, but also against the values repeatedly expressed by Bostonians in polls following the bombings. The most recent Boston Globe poll on the issue found that 66 percent of Boston residents, and 63 percent of state of Massachusetts residents, favored a life sentence for Tsarnaev. Massachusetts abolished the death penalty in 1984. The jury in this case had the option to sentence Tsarnaev to death because the US federal government, rather than state authorities, prosecuted him, and the federal death penalty has yet to be abolished.

At the Universal Period Review, the US delegation responded to international criticism by pointing out that no federal defendant had been executed in over a decade. But this response glosses over the fact that the federal government has sought death sentences in at least 200 cases since 1988. The verdict in the Tsarnaev case further highlights the temerity of this response.

If the US wishes to strengthen its standing as a rights-respecting nation, an abolition of the death penalty is long overdue. 

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