Didn’t he plead guilty?
Not only did a three-judge panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals throw out Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence, they also threw out three counts on which he was convicted. That still leaves more than enough convictions to ensure the Boston Marathon terrorist remains in prison for the rest of his life, the court writes in attempting to reassure everyone of the impact of the ruling, but it will likely be cold comfort to his victims. Tsarnaev didn’t raise innocence as a defense in his first trial, which means the witnesses will have to endure a full do-over in a new penalty phase: Tsarnaev’s legal team had pushed to change the venue of the trial to a courthouse that wasn’t so close to the site of the bombing, in the heart of a town so affected by the tragedy. The appeals court judges agreed, saying, “One could not turn on the radio either without hearing something about these stunningly sad events.” The appeals judges ruled that US District Court Judge George O’Toole, who oversaw Tsarnaev’s trial, “fell short” of his promise to question jurors thoroughly enough to identify the degree to which they had been exposed to facts of the case through media coverage, “providing sufficient ground to vacate his death sentences.” Part of the appeals court’s ruling was a decision to reverse three convictions for charges that Tsarnaev was carrying a firearm in connection with his possession of a pressure cooker bomb. The ruling tells the district court to enter judgments of acquittal on those charges, put together a new jury and preside over a new trial that strictly focuses on what penalty Tsarnaev should receive for the counts that are eligible for the death penalty. Tsarnaev’s attorneys had filed a post-trial motion for judgments of acquittal on these convictions that the district court judge denied. The court’s opinion, meandering and written like a bad novel at times, orders a new penalty-phase trial with more detailed voir dire and potentially (but not likely) reopening a debate over venue. The panel objected to the judge’s decisions to remove very case-specific questions the defense proposed, noting that he had promised to cover the same ground with jurors in instructions but failed to do so. The court ruled that just asking whether jurors had generally heard about the case was not sufficient, but that the judge had the duty to require them to specifically state what they had heard: Even assuming (favorably to the government) that the judge did not reversibly err on the venue question, he still had to oversee a voir-dire process capable of winnowing out partial jurors through careful questioning — indeed, in denying Dzhokhar a venue change, the judge premised his analysis in part on a pledge to run a “voir dire sufficient to identify prejudice.
