May 16, 2015 2 min read

BOSTON – Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by lethal injection, but he won’t be executed for years – maybe decades – as the appeals process runs its course. The next step is a formal imposition of the sentence. Then, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons will decide where he’ll be housed.

Judge George O’Toole Jr. will schedule a sentencing hearing to formally impose the sentence. Survivors of the bombing will be given a chance to give victim impact statements. Tsarnaev also will be allowed to speak if he chooses. It’s unclear how many victims the judge will allow to make statements.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons could send Tsarnaev to the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., which has a special unit for death row inmates and is where Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed. If he were sentenced to life, he would likely have been sent to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo. The Supermax prison is the highest-security prison in the country and houses some of the country’s most notorious criminals, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

Tsarnaev could spend years appealing his death sentence. Seventy-four people were sentenced to death since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, but only three were executed. Tsarnaev’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully to move his trial out of Massachusetts, where they argued there was too much of an emotional impact to find truly impartial jurors.

The change-of-venue issue may be one of the grounds for appeal. The federal government had a moratorium on executions since 2010 because of a review of the protocol used by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.