Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik told Newsmax on Friday that he "absolutely" agreed with the death sentence imposed on convicted Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that "the jury has given him what he wants."
"He wanted to be martyred, and the jury gave it to him," Kerik, who commanded the police force during the 9/11 attacks, said in an exclusive interview. "There's nobody better to determine his culpability and his responsibility and his actions than the jury that heard the actual evidence.
"They saw the evidence, they know what he was ultimately responsible for — and they made that decision," Kerik said. "We live in a country where we are governed by a Constitution, and we have to live by it."
The jury of seven men and five women sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 21, to
death by lethal injection on six of the 17 federal capital murder charges that he was convicted of in April stemming from the 2013 bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
Their decision came after 15 hours of deliberation in the penalty phase of Tsarnaev's trial. In total, the jury found him guilty of 30 charges in the first phase of the trial.
The blasts from two pressure-cooker bombs killed three people and wounded 264 others. The ensuing crime spree and manhunt put the Boston area on lockdown for four days, ending with Tsarnaev's arrest after he was discovered hiding in a boat in a backyard in suburban Watertown.
An ethnic Chechen who became a U.S. citizen in 2012 on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Tsarnaev was tried under federal law on the various charges, which allows for lethal injection as a punishment.
The death penalty remains highly controversial in Massachusetts, which has not put anyone to death in nearly 70 years and abolished capital punishment for state crimes in 1984.
Polls had shown that a majority of Boston-area residents opposed executing Tsarnaev.
Opponents included Martin Richard's family and the sister of Sean Collier, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology policeman who was shot to death three days after the bombing by Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, who died in a shootout with police the following day.
Since 1988, only three of the 74 people sentenced to death in the United States for federal crimes 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. He was convicted in 1997.
Others convicted of attacks labeled as terrorist by the U.S. government, including 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe-bomber Richard Reid, drew life terms in prison.
Kerik, who also oversaw New York City's jail system, is the author of the new book
"From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey From Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054" (Threshold).
He told Newsmax that he has "always supported the death penalty, especially for terrorism, cop killings."
Kerik has reservations, however, in cases where convictions are heavily based on extremely questionable circumstantial evidence.
"In this case, the evidence was overwhelming on a number of different fronts, besides the video initially," he said. "I didn't see a lot of the evidence personally, but from what I've read and the fact that he was actually captured, caught in the boat after the shootout, the evidence is overwhelming.
"I would leave that decision to the jurors who saw the evidence — and if that's the decision they made, I would support it."
The realities of terrorism in America, Kerik said, led Boston jurors to sentence Tsarnaev to death in a state that overwhelmingly rejects the punishment.
"You have to look at what's going on internationally. You have to look at what's going on around the country. People are afraid of terrorism. People realize the threats we face.
"This is a prime example of the internal threat that people in many cases have ignored," he added. "They tend to lose sight of that. They get complacent. If it doesn't happen in your own backyard, you don't focus and pay attention on it.
"This is a clear demonstration of when it is in your backyard and it does impact you, well, then you're taking a very different approach.
"This tells you a different story," Kerik said. "When it's in your backyard, and that threat is a threat that you or your children can face, it makes a big difference."
The former police commissioner said that Tsarnaev's appeals process could be easily streamlined by the federal judges hearing the cases. By law, he has an immediate right to appeal the jury's sentence.
"A lot of this appellate process, it's driven by defense attorneys, followed up by prosecutors — but the judge ultimately calls the shots on the timing," Kerik told Newsmax. "If the judge holds the prosecutors and the defense attorneys to a time, to a specific time frame, you'll see a much quicker result.
"At the end of the day, there's not much you can do about it," he added. "The gist of this is whether you like the verdict or not, it's the Constitution we live by.
"A lot of people, they don't like the result. If they want a different result, then go somewhere else and live — because at the end of the day, this is the justice system we live by.
"It's not perfect, by no means. It's flawed and failed in many ways that I've seen — but at the end of the day, it is the system we have to live by, and people have to deal with it."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.