An appellate court has tossed the death sentence and overturned three of the convictions of 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The ruling will not result in Tsarnaev, 27, being freed, and the death penalty can now be revisited in a penalty-phase trial do-over.
If federal prosecutors do not pursue a second death penalty trial, Tsarnaev will remain imprisoned on multiple life sentences that are not affected by Friday’s ruling.
The death penalty was invalidated because the trial judge did not adequately screen jurors for pre-trial bias, the ruling read.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will remain confined to prison for the rest of his life, with the only remaining question being whether the government will end his life by executing him,” the ruling read.
Tsarnaev is currently in a federal “supermax” prison in Colorado.
The 224-page ruling by a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was released Friday afternoon.
In it, federal appellate Judge Rogeriee Thompson cited two errors in the criminal and death-penalty trials that found Tsarnaev guilty and then condemned him to death.
The trial judge, George O’Toole, failed to ensure that jurors were untainted by pre-trial publicity, Thompson wrote, an error that now mandates a new death penalty trial — possibly outside of Boston.
Tsarnaev had argued through his lawyers that he could not have received an impartial trial in a city still reeling from the attack.
The trial judge also erred in denying the avowed Islamist terrorist’s post-trial motion involving three firearms convictions; those three convictions have now been overturned.
The ruling began by acknowledging that the April 15, 2013 bombing, committed with a pair of homemade, pressure-cooker bombs by Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan — who died in a police shootout — was “one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks since the 9/11 atrocities.”
The brothers’ shrapnel-filled bombs “caused battlefield-like carnage” when they detonated near the marathon’s finish line, ending three lives and inflicting “horrific, life-altering injuries” on hundreds more.
“BBs, nails, metal scraps, and glass fragments littered the streets and sidewalks,” the ruling recalled.
“Blood and body parts were everywhere – so much so that it seemed as if ‘people had just been dropped like puzzle pieces onto the sidewalk’ (a description taken from a witness’s trial testimony).”
The ruling contrasted trial witness accounts of gore and heartbreak — a bleeding, five-year-old boy’s cries of, “Mommy, mommy, mommy,” and victim Krystle Campbell’s last words, “legs hurt,” though her legs had been blown off — with Dzhokhar’s post-bombing calm.
Tsarnaev returned to the University of Massachusetts at dartmouth, where he worked out with a pal at a campus gym, and tweeted, “I’m a stress free kind of guy,” the ruling noted.
The brothers would then shoot a campus police officer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “in cold blood,” after a four-day manhunt, the ruling noted.
The two brothers would fling pipe bombs and a third pressure-cooker bomb at Watertown, Mass. cops in a dramatic standoff
Put on trial two years later, Tsarnaev through his lawyers “conceded he did everything the government alleged,” the judge wrote — but he fought the death penalty by blaming his dead brother for having radicalized him into being a jihadist.
The jury thought otherwise, convicting on all charges and finding he should be executed on the death-penalty eligible counts, a recommendation with which a district judge complied.