Boston Marathon attacker Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence rejected by the appeals court

BOSTON (Reuters) – A federal appeals court overturned the death sentence of Boston Marathon attacker Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Friday for helping carry out the 2013 attack, which killed three people and wounded more than 260.

Tsarnaev and his older brother blew up a pair of homemade pressure cooker pumps near the finish line of the world-renowned race, shattering the crowd and causing many people to lose legs.

The 1st United States Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld much of Tsarnaev’s conviction, but ordered a trial judge to hold a new trial strictly on the sentence Tsarnaev should receive for crimes eligible for punishment. of death for which he was convicted.

A spokeswoman for US Attorney Andrew Lelling said her office is reviewing the decision and will have more to say “in the coming days and weeks.” A Tsarnaev lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

US Circuit Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson, writing for the court, said the trial judge “failed to comply” in carrying out the jury selection process and made sure it could eliminate partial juries exposed to advertising. pre-trial around the high-profile case.

Thompson said widespread news coverage of the bombings and its aftermath included “chilling” photos and videos of Tsarnaev, now 27, and his brother carrying backpacks at the marathon and of the wounded and dead near their finish line. .

The trial judge allowed his jury to include jurors who “had already formed an opinion that Dzhokhar was guilty, and he did so largely because they answered ‘yes’ to the question of whether they could decide this high-profile case based in the evidence. ”

Thompson emphasized the limits of the court’s ruling. Make no mistake: Dzhokhar will spend the remaining days locked up in jail, and the only thing that remains is whether he will die by execution, “he said.

Tsarnaev is being held in the United States “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, a place so remote and well protected that it is nicknamed “Alcatraz of the Rockies”.

Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan sparked five days of panic in Boston on April 15, 2013, when they detonated two homemade pressure cooker pumps at the finish line of the marathon and then went into hiding.

Three nights later, as they attempted to flee the city, they sparked a new round of terror in Boston when they hijacked a car and then shot and killed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, Sean Collier. Tsarnaev’s brother died later that night after a police shooting, which ended when Dzhokhar hit him with a stolen car.

MANHUNT FROM HOUSE TO HOUSE

Police then closed Boston and most surrounding communities for nearly 24 hours, with heavily armed officers conducting house-to-house searches in the Watertown suburb, where the surviving brother was found hiding in a dry dock boat in a backyard. .

A 2015 federal jury found Tsarnaev guilty of the 30 charges he faced and later determined that he deserved the execution of a bomb he planted that killed Martin Richard, 8, and Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 23. Restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, was also killed in the attack with a bomb planted by Tamerlan.

Tsarnaev’s lawyers argued that the case should not have been tried in Boston, where potential jurors were exposed to heartbreaking wall-to-wall media coverage of the attacks and victims, many of whom lost limbs.

Bill and Denise Richard, whose son Martin, 8, was the youngest victim in the attack, in a statement printed on the front page of the Boston Globe in 2015, had asked the US Department of Justice to abandon the search for the death penalty. , saying it would only prolong his pain.

On the day of his sentencing, Tsarnaev admitted to his crimes.

“I regret the lives I have taken, the suffering I have caused you, the damage I have done, the irreparable damage,” said Tsarnaev. “In case there is any doubt, I am guilty of this attack, along with my brother.”