Attorneys representing Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appealed their client’s conviction and death sentence Thursday, arguing that it was unfair for Tsarnaev to be tried in a city that was still reeling from the trauma of his attack, CNBC reports. In 2015, Tsarnaev was convicted of placing the bombs close to the finish line of the 2013 race, which killed three people and injured 260, and of fatally shooting a police officer during the resulting manhunt. He was convicted of 17 charges in total relating to the terror attack, and a jury found that six of those charges merited the death penalty. But in a brief filed with a Boston appellate court, Tsarnaev’s lawyers argued that the “heart-wrenching stories about the homicide victims, the wounded and their families” that dominated Massachusetts media at the time made it impossible to find an unbiased jury. “The pre-trial publicity was damning: the more a prospective juror had seen, the more likely she was to believe that Tsarnaev was guilty and deserved the death penalty,” the lawyers wrote.
