A U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the death penalty on one of the Boston Marathon bomb attackers. The federal judges upheld a large part of the verdict that had been imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. However, they instructed a lower authority to start a new trial on the charges for which he had been sentenced to death.
Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan detonated two explosive devices in the target area of the race in April 2013. Three people were killed and more than 260, some seriously injured. A policeman and a tamerlan were also killed during the flight, which lasted several days. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested a little later. Tsarnaev was found guilty on 30 charges and convicted.
Juries had spoken on social media
The three judges of the Court of Appeal now published their decision more than six months after the hearings on the case. Tsarnaev’s lawyers had argued that intense media coverage made it impossible to conduct a fair trial in Boston. They also referred to statements from two jurors on social media who suggested that they had had a clear opinion on the case before the trial started in 2015.
At a hearing last December, the judges of the 1st Federal Appeals Court in Boston asked many questions about the possible bias of the two juries. So they asked why the two had not been released or why the presiding judge of the trial did not at least inquire after the postings became known. They stressed that the Boston court had a long-standing rule that required such research.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers alleged that one of the two jurors, who also became the jury spokesman, published two dozen comments on Twitter after the attack. In a tweet after Tsarnaev’s arrest, he described the suspect as a “piece of garbage”.
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