Tsarnaev’s lawyers want extra time to build appeal
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers want more time to craft his opening argument for a new trial, explaining the appellate brief will span several hundred pages and raise 17 issues, including how the Boston Marathon bomber’s hospital-bed confession was used to secure evidence against him.
The document is scheduled to be filed Nov. 19 in the U.S. Court of Appeals. The public defenders are asking for an extension to Dec. 19.
Tsarnaev, 25, has been in solitary confinement at the federal Supermax penitentiary in Colorado since his conviction and death sentence three years ago for the April 15, 2013, terrorist attack at the marathon finish line in Copley Square. The appellate team has also filed longsealed statements Tsarnaev made to the FBI post-arrest.
Tsarnaev required intubation to be kept alive after a high-powered gunshot during his capture fractured his skull. He was additionally shot in the face, throat, jaw, left hand and both legs.
Communicating by handwritten notes, Tsarnaev justified the murders of Martin Richard, 8, Boston University graduate student Lingzi Lu, 23, restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, and MIT police officer Sean Collier, 27, by telling agents, “Americans are killing people overseas. They needed to feel the same pain . ... I did what is necessary.”
He claimed the reason he wore his white hat backward and made no effort to cover his face was because he and his older brother Tamerlan assumed they would die for their cause that day.
When asked about the radicalization of Tamerlan, who was killed in a firefight with police in Watertown days later, Tsarnaev replied, “You gotta talk to God on this one buddy. Theres (sic) no one else that convinced him. The man had a wife and daughter. Can you imagine how much you have to believe in something to give that up?”
The then University of Massachusetts Dartmouth student ensured agents no other attacks were planned and they acted alone, scrawling in a notebook, “Listen fellas, no one else is involved.”