Lawyers for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Thursday asked an appellate court to overturn his conviction and death penalty sentence for helping carry out the 2013 attack, which killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.
Lawyers for Tsarnaev, 25, argued in a brief filed with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston that a lower-court judge's refusal to move the case to another city not traumatized by the bombings deprived him of a fair trial.
The attorneys acknowledged that their client, then 19, carried out the attack along with his now-deceased 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
But they argued that wall-to-wall media coverage of the bombings meant that nearly the entire jury pool was exposed to news about the attacks, which included "heart-wrenching stories about the homicide victims, the wounded and their families."
"The pre-trial publicity was damning: the more a prospective juror had seen, the more likely she was to believe that Tsarnaev was guilty and deserved the death penalty," Tsarnaev's lawyers wrote in a 500-page brief.
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The defense attorneys act as if the defendant acted in a victim abetting in this crime carried out by his brother. It is not like the real victim families did not have heart-breaking emotional and mental traumas as a result. This type of person who commits or assists in this type of savage crime only deserves the ultimate penalty. Let's face it, he had a choice to run away from it all, but took the wrong road. His choice, bad, really bad decision.
ReplyDelete"The more SHE was..." What the jury was all women or was this attorney referencing one female juror?
ReplyDeleteThe evidence doesn't lie.
ReplyDeleteGive me 5 minutes with that POS.
ReplyDeleteHis and his brother's intent was to kill and maim a bunch of random, unsuspecting, innocent Americans at a public gathering. The plan was carried out and their intended targets killed and maimed. What's the problem here?
ReplyDeleteYou’ve seen no evidence.
ReplyDeleteHe didn’t do it.
They were part of a Psyop