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.”
