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Boston Marathon Bomber Charged With Using 'Weapon of Mass Destruction'
New submitter bunkymag writes "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has now been indicted on over 30 charges relating to his part in the Boston Marathon bombing. Of particular note however is a charge of using a 'Weapon of Mass Destruction.' It's a bit out of line with the commonly-held perception of the term, most notably used in justifying the invasion of Iraq. However, U.S. criminal law defines a 'weapon of mass destruction' much more broadly, including virtually any explosive device: bombs, grenades, rockets, missiles, mines, etc. The question arises: is it wise for Tsarnaev to face such a politically-loaded charge? From an outsider perspective, it would seem easy enough to leverage any number of domestic anti-terror laws to achieve anything up to and including the death penalty if required. Why, then, muddy the waters with this new WMD claim, when the price could be giving further ammunition to groups outside of America that already clearly feel the rules are set up to indict them on false pretenses, and explicitly use this sense of outrage to attract new terrorist recruits?"
there is a difference between federal law and state law. Murder is not generally considered a federal offense (in one of the civil rights murders it was federal only because it occurred on federal land http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ex-federal-prosecutor-who-led-historic-case-dies)
That is why people entering the country have to say they will not commit a crime while they are here. Any crime they commit is probably only a state issue, but lying on your federal entry form ...
Keeping them alive makes the rest of us pay for it...
That's just stupid.
You want him kept alive forever? YOU pay for it... I'd rather pay $.005 for a bullet and be done with it.
You are an idiot.
Please stop talking until you learn something about the topic.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Cool, so when does the President go on trial for authorizing the murder of civilians using WMDs?
Before you respond with any of that , "at war blah blah blah" nonsense, keep in mind that Congress has not declared war on Pakistan.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If you look at the laws themselves it's a bit weird; 18 USC sec. 2332a seems to introduce the term "weapons of mass destruction" for the sole purpose of re-naming a definition provided in 18 USC sec. 921 called "destructive device," which dates to 1934 at the latest. I'm not savvy enough to figure out when the "WMD" terminology was introduced, but it's at least older than 1996 and seems to serve no purpose other than sounding grandiose.
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Tsarnaev is guilty of terrorism. It is guilty of murder. It is guilty of harming other people and property. It is guilty of robbery. It is guilty of kidnapping. It is guilty of manufacturing and deploying destructive devises (of which WMDs are just a very small subset.) One could argue that he is guilty of organized crime (with the objective of committing acts of terrorism.)
While I agree with most of what you say, calling him "it" doesn't seem helpful. He's still human and I'm not sure what you hope to achieve by excluding him from the species. Sounds like the kind of language that would get a prosecutor a reproach for turning the court into the kind of circus you've advocated avoiding.
He's also not guilty of anything yet.
Authorities, please: Let us not make one more mockery out of legal institutions and charge this criminal appropriately.
Don't make a mockery of legal institutions by assuming a suspect's guilt before his trial.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The term "weapon of mass destruction" has meant things like grenades, flamethrowers, and improvised explosives for at least a century in law. The term is defined in every state's gun laws, and has nothing to do with NBC weapons. Bush's use of it to describe chemical weapons, which is the first time many people heard the term, was non-standard. (Basically, it's been clear for as long as there have been gun laws that they don't include the right to make arbitrary improvised weapons, and during the "bomb throwing anarchist" years ~100 years ago these laws were given real teeth.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bullshit. It was objectively standard for chemical weapons to be considered weapons of mass destruction way before Bush ever used the term.
For example:
1972 UN Treaty http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/sea_bed/text
1998 CNN article http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/12/16/transcripts/clinton.html
Or a billion other examples that are easy to find if you search any news or legislative archive.
And I used the government code web search for California, Louisiana, and Massachusetts to look up your state law claim. Only Louisiana had any law with a reference to "mass destruction" and that was most definitely not about simple explosives.
So for a typical West Coast, East Coast, and Southern State there is no mention of Weapon of Mass Destruction and certainly not in the ridiculous manner of the federal law that says that a potato gun is a WMD ("any destructive device as defined in section 921 of this title"->"expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter").
It's so broad that they had to specifically mention that shotguns are not WMDs! Absurd.
There are only a handful of things that will get you sentenced to death under federal law. Yes, he could be charged with first degree murder, but that wasn't done on the federal level, so the jurisdiction of the commonwealth of Massachusetts would take precedence over federal law there (and there is no death penalty in MA). He can be charged FEDERALLY with nothing else that would be able to get him the death penalty. He wasn't smuggling aliens, did not destroy aircraft, did not perpetrate a drug-related drive-by shooting, didn't kill law enforcement officials, etc. Thus this is the only charge that the federal government can bring against him that could result in the death penalty. It's not about being politically charged - it's about them desiring to be able to kill him, and not having another way to go about it.