Well, yesterday the jury in the federal court in Boston convicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on all 30 counts the the “Boston Marathon Bombing” trial.

That was about as suspenseful as whether the sun would come up tomorrow.

Now we move on to the penalty phase, where the question will be whether Dzhokhar will be put to death.

For reasons I’ve already articulated, I would rather that Dzhokhar get the only available alternative — spending the rest of his life in prison — so that just as the Manson women did, he can spend the rest of his long life contemplating the wisdom of what he did.

Back in 2013, Dzhokhar thought that murdering an eight year old child, a Chinese graduate student and a young professional woman would somehow land him in heaven. Here’s what he wrote in the famous  boat:

“I’m jealous of my brother who ha[s] [re]ceived the reward of jannutul  Firdaus (inshallah) before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions. I ask Allah to make  me a shahied (iA) to allow me to return to him and be among all the  righteous people in the highest levels of heaven…The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that.

“As a [UI] I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished, we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all. Well at least that’s how muhhammad (pbuh) wanted it to be [for]ever, the ummah is beginning to rise/[UI] has awoken the mujahideen, know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that. We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said [UI] it is allowed. All credit goes [UI]. Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”

It would be beyond repetitive, I suppose, to remind everyone that there is no heaven, and that heaven itself is a child’s concept. Dzhokhar probably thinks his brother had the services of 72 virgins when he got to the afterlife.

(And just as an aside, what is the whole thing about virgins? The attraction of that has always escaped me.)

But I digress. The point is that ideas like the existence of heaven and an eternally blessed after-life are such corrupting ideas, they allow otherwise reasonable — or at least putatively reasonable — human beings to think that it’s okay to do the kind of thing that Dzhokhar did. The kid who is no longer “chill.” Good luck in prison, because you’re likely to be there for a long, long time.