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2019-12-10 Home Front: WoT
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appeals death sentence
The poor, deserted lad still has nothing better to do than file motions while he waits to die.
[Jpost] This city's deepest wound - the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three and injured hundreds more - will be re-examined Thursday when lawyers for bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
...the pretty, ethnic-Chechen college boy from Dagestan who, with the older brother he subsequently ran over while fleeing police, used pressure cooker bombs to blow up the Boston Marathon in 2013. His divorced parents now live in Russia, having given up on the American dream. Oddly enough, the mosque the brothers frequented, the Islamic Society of Boston, was founded by Friend of the Clintons and Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi in 1981, and is a hotbed of jihadi sentiment and connctions to so many different jihadi groups and individuals the mind boggles....
seek to have his death sentence
...the barbaric practice of sentencing a murderer to be punished for as long as his/her/its victim is dead...
lifted because the jury pool was too traumatized to render a fair verdict.

Continued from Page 2


The then-19-year old Tsarnaev and his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan sparked five days of panic in Boston that began April 15, 2013, when they detonated a pair of homemade pressure cooker bombs at the race's packed finish line. The pair eluded capture for days, punctuated by a gunbattle with police in Watertown that killed Tamerlan and led to a daylong lockdown of Boston and most of its suburbs while heavily armed officers and troops conducted a house-to-house search for Dzhokhar.

Tsarnaev's defense team, in briefs filed with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, argued that the unprecedented shelter-in-place order biased the pool of potential jurors, including one actual juror who joined the unanimous vote for the death penalty
The manhunt for the younger Tsarnaev, now 26, left an indelible mark on the city. Armored vehicles and thousands of National Guard troops cast a dragnet across the Boston suburb of Watertown. Just before a resident found a maimed Tsarnaev hiding in a boat parked in his backyard, a broadcast of a Boston police scanner channel attracted nearly 265,000 listeners.

"Even if a juror honestly believes before trial that he or she can objectively hear the evidence, when a community has been aroused to a fever pitch, the prospective juror may come to fear returning to neighbors with anything other than a guilty verdict and a death sentence," Tsarnaev's defense team wrote in a legal brief.

U.S. Justice Department lawyers disagreed, saying Tsarnaev received a fair trial. The department has noted a survey conducted for Tsarnaev's own lawyers found 96.5% of respondents in Washington, his preferred venue for the trial, had heard of the bombings.

But legal experts say arguing that some jurors were tainted with bias may offer the defense team its best bet in winning relief from the court. The defense and prosecution each will get an hour to argue their side before an appellate panel of judges.

"Of course, (the defense) will throw in the kitchen sink, the bedroom furniture and everything else in hoping something sticks," said Robert Bloom, a professor at Boston College Law School. "That is what you do in these cases."

The defense team says the trial should not have been held in Boston, that some jurors made false statements before their selection, and that the jury should have heard that Tamerlan had been a suspect in a 2011 triple homicide.

A friend of Tamerlan admitted to the FBI having committed the murders with him, according to recently unsealed court documents. The jury did not hear about those murders during the trial.

The younger Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in 2015 after a jury found him guilty of killing three people: Martin Richard, 8; Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 26, and restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, in the bombing; as well as murdering Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 26, three days later as the brothers attempted to flee the city.

Before the bombings, the younger Tsarnaev had no record of serious criminal offense. But Tamerlan was aggressive, domineering and likely homicidal before driving his younger brother to join him in carrying out the bombings, according to the defense team's line of reasoning in court papers.

Tsarnaev's defense team also says the jury's foreperson falsely denied, during the selection process, calling Tsarnaev a "piece of garbage" on Twitter. That juror lived in Dorchester, the same neighborhood as the attack's youngest victim, according to defense team legal briefs.

During the trial, Richard's family asked U.S. prosecutors to consider taking the death penalty off the table. They said the death penalty could bring years of appeals and prolong reliving the most painful day of their lives, according to a letter published in the Boston Globe newspaper. A poll by the Globe also showed that about two-thirds of Massachusetts residents favored a life sentence for Tsarnaev.
Posted by trailing wife 2019-12-10 00:00|| || Front Page|| [27 views ]  Top
 File under: al-Qaeda 

#1 It's not nice to blow up your neighbors. Not a lawyer, but the fact that some of them are a bit miffed hardly seems like extenuating circumstances.
Posted by SteveS 2019-12-10 01:48||   2019-12-10 01:48|| Front Page Top

#2 Some peoples' American Dream is a nightmare for America.
Posted by Dron66046 2019-12-10 02:03||   2019-12-10 02:03|| Front Page Top

#3 Why is this thing not dead already?

I'm a little surprised that Zero didn't use this for a Sister Soldja moment.
Posted by AlanC 2019-12-10 07:03||   2019-12-10 07:03|| Front Page Top

#4 If I was him, I would appeal it too. What do I have to lose?
Posted by BernardZ 2019-12-10 07:09||   2019-12-10 07:09|| Front Page Top

#5 
The bloody 'fondue process'. I've never understood the rationale for allowing people caught in the act and sworn to fight to the death a fair trial.

Humanism shall be the death of humans.

Posted by Dron66046 2019-12-10 07:28||   2019-12-10 07:28|| Front Page Top

#6 Too bad he didn't get run over like he did to his brother.
Posted by Rambler in Virginia 2019-12-10 07:54||   2019-12-10 07:54|| Front Page Top

#7 ^ That would be Tamerlan, better known as 'Speed Bump' around these parts.
Posted by Raj 2019-12-10 08:11||   2019-12-10 08:11|| Front Page Top

#8 There is a legal prohibition against "cruel and unusual" punishment.

Thought #1 - making him suffer thru all these (denied) appeals is cruel and unusual. Execute him now.

Thought #2. My legal quibblese dictionary indicates that the language allows punishments that are cruel but not unusual and those that are unusual but not cruel. Drawing and quartering has been in use for hundreds of years, if not recently - so it's not unusual.
The prohibition says nothing about how recent its use has to be to be considered unusual.
Posted by Mercutio 2019-12-10 08:52||   2019-12-10 08:52|| Front Page Top

#9 Life sentence without appeal or parole - what's that work out to these days? Ten years with time off for good behavior?
Posted by KBK 2019-12-10 09:45||   2019-12-10 09:45|| Front Page Top

#10 His victims didn't get to appeal theirs.
Posted by Mullah Richard 2019-12-10 11:23||   2019-12-10 11:23|| Front Page Top

#11 Some punishments are cruel but not unusual.
Some punishments are not cruel but unusual.
Some punishments, like Goldilocks' porridge, are just right. Like Tsarnev's punishment.
Posted by Alaska Paul 2019-12-10 16:13||   2019-12-10 16:13|| Front Page Top

#12 KBK, that's about it
Posted by chris 2019-12-10 18:12||   2019-12-10 18:12|| Front Page Top

#13 Off with his head.
Posted by Herb McCoy 2019-12-10 19:00||   2019-12-10 19:00|| Front Page Top

#14 The Founders who wrote that 'cruel and unusual' had no problem executing miscreants. Once again our judiciary aristocracy has taken it upon themselves to ignore Article V and amend the Constitution by fiat.

What they have done by their actions is to absolve themselves of the contract between the people and the state in which the state said it would render justice rather than the traditional vendetta used to render justice.
Posted by Procopius2k 2019-12-10 19:25||   2019-12-10 19:25|| Front Page Top

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