Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers want death sentence thrown out, arguing unfair trial
- The lawyers argued the trial court’s ‘first fundamental error’ was denying the defence’s requests to move the case out of the city ‘traumatised by the bombings’
Lawyers for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told a federal appeal court Thursday that his convictions or death sentence should be tossed because the judge refused to move the case out of the city where the bombs exploded, making it impossible for him to get a fair trial.
In a 500-page brief filed in the 1st US District Court of Appeals, Tsarnaev’s legal team outlined a host of other problems with his 2015 trial, including issues with jurors, certain testimony from surviving victims and the defence’s inability to tell jurors about links between Tsarnaev’s brother and an unsolved triple killing in 2011.
The lawyers argued the trial court’s “first fundamental error” was denying the defence’s repeated requests to move the case out of a city that was “traumatised by the bombings, ordered to shelter in place during the manhunt, saturated by prejudicial publicity and united in the Boston Strong movement”.
“Tsarnaev stood accused of notorious crimes. The bombings were the subject of constant and widespread publicity, which included coverage of matters that would never be admitted at trial,” the lawyers wrote. “Virtually every single prospective juror was familiar with that publicity, had been personally affected by the crimes and their aftermath, and thus had formed negative, entrenched preconceptions about Tsarnaev’s guilt and the appropriate sentence,” they said.
Tsarnaev was sentenced to death just over two years after he and his brother set off two shrapnel-packed, pressure-cooker bombs near the Boston Marathon’s finish line on April 15, 2013, killing three people and wounding more than 260.