“For the first time in the Boston Marathon bombing case, all eyes won’t be on the perpetrator — and the odds may be tilting his way,” the Boston Globe reported. Lawyers are trying to overturn the verdict in the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 26.
Lawyers want a new trial for the terrorist who put a bomb at the feet of little Martin Richard and who admitted to the bombing.
Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 of 30 counts related to the Marathon bombing, which killed three people: Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, 29, of Arlington; and Martin Richard, an 8-year-old from Dorchester.
More than 260 other people were injured, including 17 who lost limbs. Days later, Tsarnaev killed MIT police officer Sean Collier in cold blood. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died during a firefight with police in Watertown that left a Transit police officer gravely wounded. Dzhokhar ran over his own brother to escape. The article at the Globe left that out.
There were 17 counts for capital punishment.
INDICT EVERYONE BUT DZHOKHAR
Four years later, a hotshot lawyer from New York will try to indict the prosecutors, defense attorneys, the judge, and the jury to claim he didn’t have a fair trial.
Oral arguments will take place before three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on Thursday.
They will say trial Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. withheld evidence from jurors that Tsarnaev’s older brother Tamerlan had brutally killed three people and was the mastermind. The fact is Tamerlan was not convicted of anything. It was presumed.
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Even if he was a ‘mastermind,’ how does that square with him putting a bomb at an 8-year-old boy’s feet or killing an innocent cop days later?
“There were very big risks in keeping the case in Boston — that’s why you have this extraordinary set of circumstances,” said George Kendall, a New York-based lawyer who specializes in death penalty cases and followed the trial in Boston. He said it was clear from the outset that it would be difficult to impanel an impartial jury in the same city where the bombs went off, at one of the city’s most cherished sporting events.
“Everyone knew that once you decided to keep the case in Boston, you really had to go the full mile to make sure any possible contaminating influences were really rooted out and put on the table,” he said. “But what you had here is jurors basically hiding stuff.”
That’s a stretch.
THE JURORS’ TWEETS
The lawyer is also going to indict two jurors for tweets.
This isn’t about a fair trial, it’s about getting him out of his fate. This is why terrorists need to go to GITMO or they will one day be free to commit more heinous crimes.
In legal filings over the last year, Tsarnaev’s lawyers argued that the trial should never have been held in Boston.
Before the trial got underway, O’Toole rejected the argument, saying he had set up a screening process that would filter out any juror bias.
But defense lawyers found 22 Twitter posts in which — allegedly — one juror mourned the victims, praised the officers and called Tsarnaev a “piece of garbage.” A second juror — allegedly — had a Facebook post in which a friend said to send him to jail where he “will be taken care of.”
Tsarnaev’s lawyers wrote that the questions about the jurors’ preexisting prejudice against the defendant contributed to a “fundamentally unfair proceeding that damages the credibility of the American judicial system.”
“That dereliction of the unflagging duty to investigate colorable or plausible claims of juror misconduct would have been error in any trial. In a capital prosecution, it was intolerable,” the lawyers argued.
How is it that bias against Trump doesn’t matter, but any bias against a terrorist does?
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