A court of appeals had vacated Tsarnaev's death sentence but it was reinstated by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 vote.
The Supreme Court has reinstated convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence for the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260.
In a 6-3 decision on Friday, the justices sided with the federal challenge to a 2020 ruling by a Boston-based court that had upheld Tsarnaev's conviction but overturned his death sentence.
The Supreme Court faulted the first US Circuit Court of Appeals on its findings that Tsarnaev's right to a fair trial under the US Constitution's Sixth Amendment was violated, and that the trial judge wrongly excluded certain evidence about a separate crime.
The court's six conservative justices were in the majority, with its three liberals dissenting.
"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial... He received one," conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.
Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer called on the court to reconsider capital punishment.
“I have written elsewhere about the problems inherent in a system that allows for the imposition of the death penalty... This case provides just one more example...” he wrote.
READ MORE: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wins death penalty appeal
Deadly bombing
Tsarnaev’s guilt in the deadly bombings was not at issue, only whether he should be put to death or spend the rest of his life in prison.
Lawyers for Tsarnaev have argued that he played a secondary role in the marathon bombing to his brother Tamerlan, who they called "an authority figure".
The Tsarnaev brothers detonated two homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the marathon's finish line on April 15, 2013.
On the run, they killed a police officer days later. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a gunfight with police.
Jurors convicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is 28 now and was 19 at the time of the attack, in 2015 on all 30 counts he faced and determined he deserved execution for a bomb he planted.
The bomb killed Martin Richard, 8, and Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 23. Restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, was killed by the second bomb.
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