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?"

Comments

Re:the way I see it

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re:the way I see it

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re:the way I see it

[Samantha Wright]

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.

Re:We're making this all up anyway

[DarkTempes]

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.