COURT NIXES FIEND DEATH
Now life in prison for Boston bomber
An appellate court has tossed the death sentence and overturned three of the convictions of 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, citing inadequate screening of jurors for potential bias.
The ruling will not result in Tsarnaev, 27, being freed, and the death penalty can now be revisited in a do-over of that phase of the trial.
If federal prosecutors do not pursue a second death-penalty trial, Tsarnaev will remain imprisoned on multiple life sentences that are not affected by Friday’s ruling.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will remain confined to prison for the rest of his life, with the only remaining question being whether the government will end his life by executing him,” the ruling read.
Tsarnaev is currently in a federal “supermax” prison in Colorado.
The 224-page ruling by a threejudge panel of the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals was released Friday afternoon.
In it, Judge Rogeriee Thompson cited two errors in the criminal and death-penalty trials that found Tsarnaev guilty and then condemned him to death in 2015.
The trial judge, George O’Toole, failed to ensure that jurors were untainted by pretrial publicity, Thompson wrote, an error that now mandates a new death penalty trial — possibly outside of Boston.
Tsarnaev had argued through his lawyers that he could not have received an impartial trial in a city still reeling from the attack.
The trial judge also erred in denying the Islamist terrorist’s posttrial motion involving three firearms convictions. Those three have now been overturned.
“It’s ridiculous,” bombing survivor Marc Fucarile said of the court’s death-penalty toss.
“Put him to rest. Bury him. Put him under the jail,” Fucarile, who lost his right leg in the terror attack, told Boston WEEI radio show “Ordway, Merloni and Fauria.”
The appellate ruling acknowledged that the April 15, 2013, bombing, committed with two homemade pressure-cooker bombs by Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan — who died four days after the bombing following a police shootout — was “one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks since the 9/11 atrocities.”
The brothers’ shrapnel-filled bombs “caused battlefield-like carnage” when they detonated near the marathon’s finish line, ending three lives and inflicting “horrific, life-altering injuries” on more than 260 other victims.
The brothers would then fatally shoot a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer “in cold blood” after a four-day manhunt and fling pipe bombs and a third pressure-cooker explosive at cops in a dramatic standoff in Watertown, Mass.
On trial two years later, Tsarnaev fought the death penalty by blaming his brother for radicalizing him into being a jihadist.
The jury thought otherwise, convicting on all charges and finding he should be executed on the death-penalty-eligible counts.