On Thursday, attorneys for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev asked an appellate court to overturn his conviction and death penalty sentence for helping carry out the 2013 attack, which killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.
Lawyers for the 25-year-old Tsarnaev argued in a brief filed with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston that a lower-court judge’s refusal to move the case to another city not traumatized by the bombings deprived him of a fair trial. The attorneys acknowledged that their client — who was then 19 — carried out the attack along with his now-deceased 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
The appeal came after a federal jury in 2015 found Tsarnaev guilty of placing a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the race on April 15, 2013, as well as fatally shooting a policeman three days later. The same jury later found that Tsarnaev deserved execution for six of the 17 capital charges of which he was found guilty, which were related to the bomb he personally placed at the marathon’s finish line. That bomb killed 8-year-old Martin Richard, the youngest victim, and 23-year-old Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu. The bombing was one of the highest-profile attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
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