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On Friday, a federal appeals court set aside the death sentence handed down to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing. The attack killed three people and injured 260 others. The three-judge court of appeals panel said that the jurors were not adequately screened for potential bias.

The judges of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new penalty-phase trial to consider whether the 27-year-old Tsarnaev should be executed for the crimes. In total Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 charges, which includes conspiracy and “use of a weapon of mass destruction.”

According to NPR news, the panel cited errors made in the original case and returned it to the federal district court that had convicted Tsarnaev in 2015.

In the original conviction, Dzhokhar received six death sentences and 11 concurrent life sentences. In the ruling, the court ordered that a new jury be impaneled and have a retrial for sentencing. The death penalty may still be applied if the new jury believes it is appropriate.

The court of appeals claims bias went undetected

"A core promise of our criminal-justice system is that even the very worst among us deserves to be fairly tried and lawfully punished," wrote Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson in the 224-page opinion. Judge Thompson went on to note that the district court judge who had presided over the conviction had not adequately vetted the jurors for bias.

Tsarnaev’s lawyers have maintained from the beginning that both their client and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were responsible for the bombing. But they argued Tamerlan was the mastermind and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is, therefore, less culpable than his brother, who they said was the mastermind behind the attack.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a gunfight with police a few days after the bombing. 

Tsarnaev’s lawyers had requested a change of venue due to intense media scrutiny and the number of people touched by the bombings in the city. The original judge, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, refused the request. At the time, he said he believed a fair and impartial jury could be found in the city.

The 1st Circuit said the pervasive media coverage, with “bone-chilling still shots and videos” of the bombing, along with the extended manhunt created a likelihood of bias. The judge was required to run a jury selection process “sufficient to identify prejudice.” 

The panel judges ultimately believed that O’Toole did not ask enough questions of the jurors and that he should not have taken the word of jurors who had already formed the opinion that Tsarnaev was guilty “because they answered ‘yes’ to the question whether they could decide this high-profile case based on the evidence.”

“But make no mistake: Dzhokhar will spend his remaining days locked up in prison, with the only matter remaining being whether he will die by execution,” the decision read. Dzhokar Tsarnaev is currently serving his sentence at a high-security supermax prison in Colorado.

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