In Boston, the Justice Department is pressing judges to uphold Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence. In New York, it’s asking jurors to impose the death penalty on a man who killed eight people in an attack on a bicycle path. President Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to work toward abolishing federal capital punishment but has taken no major steps to that end, though the Justice Department has imposed a moratorium that means no federal executions are likely to happen anytime soon. The department continues to press for the death penalty in certain cases but not in others. In a Tuesday filing, federal prosecutors said they won’t seek it for Patrick Crusius, a 24-year-old accused of fatally shooting nearly two dozen people in a racist attack at a West Texas Walmart in 2019.
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