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The verdict is in for the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the jury has recommended a death sentence.
The jury only needed 14 hours to reach its verdict on the 17 counts where he could be sentenced to death, and found for the death penalty for six of those. The only other choice for sentencing on those charges would have been life in prison. The attack killed 3 people and injured 264 people. It was the worst attack on US soil since the attack on 9/11.
AlterNet reports:
Their only other option was life without the possibility of release in America's toughest "super-max" prison in Colorado, which some have dubbed the "Alcatraz of the Rockies".
[...] "'No remorse, no apology'. Those are the words of a terrorist convinced he has done the right thing", US assistant attorney Steven Mellin said.
[...] Judge George O'Toole will now formally sentence Tsarnaev at a hearing expected to be held later in the year.
[...] The verdict in the federal case came despite widespread local opposition to capital punishment in Massachusetts, a largely Democratic state that abolished the death penalty in 1947.
Prominent survivors, including the parents of the youngest victim Martin Richard, had also opposed the death penalty on the grounds that years of prospective appeals would dredge up their agony.
[...] Since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, only 79 people have been sentenced to die and only three have been executed, says the Death Penalty Information Center. Three other death verdicts were turned into life sentences after new trials were granted.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday May 18 2015, @03:06AM
The second requirement is that you didn't use violence or kill anyone: none of those who used violence (or even advocated any kind of violence including self defense) are martyrs.
When “martyr” is used for such people it is only an incredibly bad and sloppy mistranslation across completely different cultures talking about completely different concepts and by people who for the most part don't really belong to either of the cultures in question and/or don't have any actual knowledge about them either beyond their own biased and politicized preconceptions and ulterior motives.
There is no such thing as martyrdom in islam, instead there is jihad (which is a larger, radically different, and more central concept of islam than martyrdom ever was to christianity) and the linked concept of direct transcendence to paradise when you die in struggle for islam. In mainstream islamic theology everybody else has to spend some time in hell before (possibly) being let into heaven.
Martyrdom is a christian concept that arose from the prosecution of christians by romans where christians got killed for confessing their faith i.e. words and nothing else.
Luckily for me I'm not a christian nor a muslim but there's no way such a horrendously bad translation and abuse of words and concepts is accidental: it makes people dumber, it is “anti-information”, it takes a word that is/was meant as praise and admiration and uses it for other purposes.
There is a lot of that sort of thing going on, the more confused people are the less they can think and the less they can think the less they can achieve. This in turn leads to easily exploited frustration. Cultural marxism 101, double-speak, or propaganda, call it what you will (all of those apply): it is language as warfare and traps people into cultural and political enclaves of identical syntax with entirely different meaning; a subtle version of Stalin's divide and conquer, tower of Babel 2.0.
Like it has done with much (not all) of the debate on this page (and elsewhere too) where a lot of people argue for or against based on a mostly imagined point of view (so-called “martyrdom”) which doesn't make much if any difference either way.
It is interesting that so far a single “normally innocent” and “otherwise unimportant” person killing himself (deeply haram) by setting himself on fire (a very unislamic thing to do) has had more direct, immediate, and positive impact (despite all the failed aspirations and resulting power-mongering and internal warfare) on muslim countries than tens of thousands of so-called “martyrs” or jihadists or extremists.
Yes most places it was a failure as things quickly got dragged into the same old pan-Arabic swamp of hatred but for some brief moments a door to a much better future had been opened.
He, the “lowly” fruit-seller still wasn't a martyr but maybe he's the closest muslims have come to ever having one.
He was significant, the Boston bombers aren't.
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