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Federal Appeals Court Overturns Death Sentence in Boston Marathon Bombing

A split panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has overturned the death sentence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (pictured) for his role in the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 250 others.

By a 2-1 vote on July 31, 2020, the court ruled that U.S. District Court Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. had failed to adequately question jurors about their exposure to pervasive pretrial publicity about the case. “A core promise of our criminal justice system is that even the very worst among us deserves to be fairly tried and lawfully punished,” Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson, joined by Judge William J. Kayatta Jr., wrote. “Despite a diligent effort, the judge here did not meet th[at] standard,” she said. Judge Juan Rafael Torruella dissented.

The court ruled that Tsarnaev was properly tried in Boston but was entitled to a new sentencing hearing because while the trial court properly inquired as to the sources of information from which jurors had heard about Tsarnaev and the bombing, the majority said, it failed to question nine of the twelve impaneled jurors about the content of what they had read and heard. Some of that coverage, Thompson noted, “included inaccurate or inadmissible information — like the details of [a hospital interrogation before he had been read his rights] and the opinions of public officials that he should die.”

The trial court’s failure to discern what the jurors knew, Thompson wrote, improperly “delegate[d] to potential jurors the work of judging their own impartiality.” That made it “too difficult for [the court] and the parties to determine both the nature of any taint … and the possible remedies for the taint,” she said.

The court’s decision enabled it to avoid having to address charges of actual bias against two of the jurors. Tsarnaev’s defense lawyers had presented the court with evidence of bias that included undisclosed tweets by the jury forewoman prior to trial calling Tsarnaev “that piece of garbage.”

Although the appeals court ordered the district court to conduct a new sentencing trial on Tsarnaev’s capital murder charges, it upheld the multiple life sentences the lower court imposed on non-capital charges. The panel also ordered that Tsarnaev be acquitted of three firearms possession charges, but “just to be crystal clear,” Judge Thompson added that “Dzhokhar [Tsarnaev] will remain confined to prison for the rest of his life, with the only question remaining being whether the government will end his life by executing him.”

NEWS BRIEF — Federal Government, Texas Set New Execution Dates

As July 2020 came to a close, the federal government issued two more notices of execution and a county judge in Texas reportedly issued a new death warrant for a death-row prisoner whose previously scheduled execution had been stayed.