BOSTON BOMBER SPARED
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokkar Tsarnaev has death sentence OVERTURNED in stunning court decision
A FEDERAL appeals court on Friday overturned the death sentence of the man convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing.
The three-judge panel of the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston overruled the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the men behind the attack that killed three people and injured more than 260.
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The appeals court upheld much of Tsarnaev’s conviction but ordered a lower-court judge to hold a new trail strictly over what sentence Tsarnaev should receive for the death penalty-eligible crimes he was convicted of.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers had argued that intense media coverage had made it impossible to have a fair trial in Boston.
The lawyers pointed to social media posts from two jurors suggesting they harbored strong opinions even before the 2015 trial started.
The appeals judges, in a hearing on the case in early December, devoted a significant number of questions to the juror bias argument.
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They asked why the two jurors had not been dismissed, or at least why the trial judge had not asked them follow-up questions after the social media posts came to light on the eve of the trial.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers say one of the jurors, who would go on to become the jury’s foreperson, published two dozen tweets in the wake of the bombing.
One post was posted after Tsarnaev was captured called him a “piece of garbage.”
Tsarnaev’s lawyers argued the case should not have been tried in Boston, where potential jurors were exposed to heart-wrenching, wall-to-wall media coverage about the attacks and the victims.
Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan sparked five days of panic in Boston on April 15, 2013, when the duo detonated two homemade pressure cooker bombs at the marathon’s finish line and then went into hiding.
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Three night later, as the brothers attempted to flee the city, they sparked a new wave of terror in the city when they hijacked a car and shot dead Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier.
Tamerlan died later that night after a gunfight with police, which ended when Dzhokhar ran him over with a stolen car.
Soon after police locked down Boston and the surrounding communities for almost 24 hours, with heavily armed officers conducting house-to-house searches.
Dzhokhar was found in the suburb of Watertown, hiding in a dry-docked boat in a backyard.
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In 2015, a federal jury found Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 counts he faced, which included conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction.
The jury later determined he deserved execution for a bomb he planted that killed eight-year-old, Martin Richard and 23-year-old Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu.
He’s been serving his sentence in a high-security super-max prison in Colorado.
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