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Could be fed jurisdiction because of terrorism or with “use of a weapon of mass destruction”.

In 1997 the MA Legislatur almost approved the DP, but state rep. John Slattery (”Slattery will get you nowhere”, I always say) changed his vote and it went down. (Thought there was a non binding referendum question about it shortly before which did pass...)

http://www.nodp.org/ma/stacks/globe_110797.html

>>(Nov 1997) Nine days after voting 81-79 in favor of capital punishment, the chamber deadlocked after one representative, John P. Slattery of Peabody, switched
his vote out of concern that innocent people could face execution, and that the bill did not afford enough protection for juveniles and minorities.

>>Under parliamentary rules, the 80-80 vote killed the bill, which would have allowed capital punishment for 15 categories of first-degree murder. The vote preserved Massachusetts’ status as one of 12 states without the
death penalty.

As I understand it while one of the Tsarnaev brothers shot Officer Sean Collier, the jury may have figured it was Tamerlan aka Speedbump, not “the Joker”. Maybe they both shot him...? Apparently Dzokhar had killed Martin Richard, 8, and Lu Lingzi, 23 and it was those deaths that triggered the DP (charges).

Wiki (Marathon Bombings): “On April 18 at about 10:48 pm, Sean A. Collier, 27, an MIT police officer...was ambushed in his police car and died from multiple gunshot wounds from the bombing suspects.”

According to what I read, the jury sentenced him to death specifically for the bomb he, himself, placed and detonated, which killed 8-year-old Martin Richard and Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China.

They gave him life for the rest, including the victims of his brother's bomb and the death of Officer Collier, for which they believed his brother was the trigger man.