Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by a U.S. jury on Friday, May 15, for helping carry out the 2013 bomb attack that turned the Boston Marathon from a sunny rite of spring to a smoky battlefield killing three people and wounded 264 others. After deliberating for 15 hours, the federal jury chose death by lethal injection for Tsarnaev, 21, over its only other option, life in prison without possibility of release. He is said to be the youngest person on death row in the United States.

Death penalty controversial in Massachusetts

The death penalty remains highly controversial in Massachusetts, which has not put anyone to death in almost 70 years and which abolished capital punishment for state crimes in 1984. Tsarnaev was tried under federal law, which allows for lethal injection as a punishment.

Polls had shown that a majority of Boston-area residents opposed executing Tsarnaev.

Opponents included Martin Richard's parents, who said in an open letter to the Justice Department last month that they wanted Tsarnaev to face life in prison rather getting a death sentence that would likely lead to years of appeals, keep the defendant in the spotlight and prevent them from trying to rebuild their lives.

"With every passing year, the likelihood of execution will diminish," said Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University who has studied capital punishment."

Just three of the 74 people sentenced to death in the United States for federal crimes since 1988 have been executed. The first was Timothy McVeigh, put to death in June 2001 for killing 168 people in his 1995 attack on the federal government office building in Oklahoma City.

Victims of the bombing are remembered at Copley Square in Boston. | Source: Wikipedia