BOSTON -- On Friday jurors sentenced Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for the 2013 terror attack.

David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill says the jury in this case were in a unique position when asked to choose between life and death for a convicted terrorist in an attack on US soil..

"This is the first jury to really confront that issue because most of the people who have been involved in these kinds of actions have either been caught before they could commit such acts of violence or have been killed in the act."

Jurors reached the verdict after 14 hours of deliberations.Tsarnaev was convicted last month of all 30 federal charges against him, 17 of which carried the possibility of the death penalty. Appeals are expected to take years.