A federal appeals court on July 31 denied a request by lawyers for the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to remove the judge overseeing his death sentence appeal. Tsarnaev’s lawyers cite the judge’s comments on a podcast as reason for recusal.
Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 of helping carry out the 2013 bombing that killed three people and injured more than 260 near the Boston marathon finish line.
Attorneys for Tsarnaev argued that District Court Judge George O’Toole Jr. should be recused from the case because he is not impartial, pointing to his comments about the case on podcasts and at events.
In a two-page judgment, the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument, finding that O’Toole should continue to preside over the case.
It said “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.
The Epoch Times has contacted an attorney for O’Toole for comment.
Tsarnaev worked with his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, to place an improvised explosive device—a pressure-cooker filled with shrapnel—near a crowd of spectators at the finish line area of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.
The brothers detonated the bombs seconds apart before fleeing the scene “in the chaos of the destruction,” prosecutors said.
Among those killed were Lu Lingzi, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford, Massachusetts; and 8-year-old Martin Richard, who had been at the finish line of the marathon with his family, waiting to watch his father finish the race.
Three days after detonating the bomb, the brothers drove to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus, where they shot and killed MIT Police Officer Sean Collier.
Tsarnaev was convicted of all 30 charges brought against him in 2015, including conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death, conspiracy to bomb a place of public use resulting in death, and use of a firearm, among others.
A federal judge in Boston sentenced him to death and imposed multiple consecutive life sentences; however, the First Circuit threw out the sentence in 2020, finding that the trial judge improperly excluded evidence that could have shown Tsarnaev was deeply influenced and radicalized by his older brother.
The older Tsarnaev died when he was accidentally run over by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev while trying to drive into police, shortly after shooting Collier.
The appeals court also said the judge had failed to sufficiently question jurors about their exposure to extensive news coverage of the bombing.
In 2022, the Supreme Court reinstated his death sentence after disagreeing with the appeals court’s findings that Tsarnaev’s right to a fair trial under the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment was violated and that the trial judge wrongly excluded certain evidence.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the high court.
Lawyers for Tsarnaev have attempted to appeal that decision, alleging jury misconduct.
In March, a federal appeals court ordered O’Toole to investigate claims of juror bias by the defense and to determine whether Tsarnaev’s death sentence should stand.
It is not known when O’Toole might rule on the juror bias claim. If he finds that jurors should have been disqualified, he must vacate Tsarnaev’s sentence and hold a new penalty-phase trial to determine whether Tsarnaev should be sentenced to death, according to the appeals court.
Tsarnaev is currently on death row at the supermax Federal Correctional Complex in Florence, Colorado.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
