The Pros And Cons Of The Boston Marathon Bombing

Equal protection under the law is a legal principal as the United States itself. The term criminal act does not, in modern times, have a universally accepted definition. Terrorism is certainly a crime in that it usually involved casualties. At times I feel that we forget that acts of terror come in many different sizes. Earlier this year the Boston Marathon Bombing shook the nation to its core. Acts of terror on American soil had not been committed in almost a decade. Three people died and over 264 more were injured. Does this constitute and act of war or is it still considered a crime. The handling of this situation seems to be considered a crime by the U.S Federal Government. Many serial killers have murdered many more people than died in the
incident. If the bombers had have been connected to a terrorist organization would we have considered this an act of war? Scale and scope of the act committed has a lot to do with how the U.S handles such situations. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the primary suspect and U.S citizen was tried in federal criminal court and not as an enemy combatant. The Oklahoma City Bombings are in my opinion a step up in scale from that of the Boston Marathon Bombings.
In total 168 people were killed when a bomb planted by anti-government zealot Timothy McVeigh. The cases are very similar in that each situation was handled in the U.S court system. It’s important to understand that in both cases only two persons were responsible for the act. If the U.S decided to adopt the strategy that terrorism is an act of war, how would these situations be handled? Would we simply suspend the right of habeas corpus and let the terrorists sit in Guantanamo bay the rest of their lives. A major Supreme Court case on the issue of how to classify terrorism occurred with Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. In both cases listed above the alleged terrorists were U.S citizens and with that came the right to habeas corpus. In 2001 Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen born in Louisiana, was captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance and was turned over to the U.S military as an enemy combatant and detained in connection to ongoing hostilities. After being held and interrogated in Afghanistan for months, he was transferred to Guantanamo bay but it was found that he held a U.S citizenship and he was transferred to a prison in
Virginia. The Bush Administration claimed that he was considered an enemy combatant and should be held at Guantanamo. This would lead to a legal challenge to that claim that would lead to the Supreme Court case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. The important thing to note about this case is the fact that eight of the nine Supreme Court justices stated that the executive branch does not have the power to hold a U.S citizen indefinitely without basic due process protections enforceable through judicial review. Justice Scalia went one step further in restricting the executive power of detention and stated in his opinion that there were only two options to detain Hamdi: Congress must suspend the right to habeas corpus or Hamdi must be tried under normal criminal law. He also wrote that plurality had no basis in the law for trying to establish new procedure that would be applicable to Hamdi’s detention. He goes on to state that it is only the job of the court to declare it unconstitutional and request his release or proper arrest rather than invent an acceptable process for detention. Hamdi was eventually released and set to Saudi Arabia and stripped of his U.S citizenship. No single opinion of the court commanded a majority but this was the first major case that allowed alleged enemy combatants to challenge their status.