A federal appeals court has denied a request by convicted Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to remove the judge overseeing his death sentence appeal.
Tsarnaev’s attorneys sought the removal because US District Court Judge George O’Toole appeared on a podcast and public panels discussing the work of organizing a complex jury trial, WCVB reported.
In its two-page ruling, the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals said that the “two panel discussions and a podcast in which Judge O’Toole discussed various aspects of organizing complex jury trials and the problems associated with social media in that context” did not constitute grounds for his removal, according to The Associated Press.
Last year, the appeals court ordered O’Toole to investigate complaints of possible juror bias in the penalty phase of Tsarnaev’s trial and, if he finds such bias, to order a new penalty trial.
Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 of the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon finish line that killed three people, including an 8-year-old boy, and wounded hundreds of others. The court of appeals tossed the death sentence in 2020 after finding that jurors had not been sufficiently questioned about their exposure to news coverage of the case, but the US Supreme Court reinstated the death sentence two years later.
The appeals court later ordered O’Toole to look at “the possible bias of two jurors at issue.”
Attorneys are not challenging the conviction itself. They contend that he fell under the influence of his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gun battle with police days after the bombing. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was 26 at the time; his younger brother was 19.
Tsarnaev was convicted on all 30 counts against him and is currently on death row at a supermax prison in Colorado.
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[Featured image: FILE: Dzokhar Tsarnaev/FBI via AP, File]
