This file photo by the Federal Bureau of Investigation shows Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings who is accused in two bombings that killed three people and injured more than 260 others near the finish line of the April 15 marathon. Lawyers for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev want to postpone his Nov. 3 trial and push for it to be relocated outside of the city.(Photo: Uncredited AP)
BOSTON — The man allegedly responsible for more than a dozen lost limbs, hundreds of injuries and three deaths in the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013 will be tried just one mile from where the two bombs went off.
This news is according to a ruling by a federal judge that came down Wednesday night, denying defendant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's motion requesting a change of venue.
Judge George O'Toole observed that the District of Massachusetts includes about 5 million people – enough, in his view, to impanel a jury and stage a fair trial.
As precedent, he cited the 2010 fraud trial of former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who was tried in Houston – a comparably sized metropolitan area – despite widespread local knowledge of the case and public hostility toward the defendant.
"The division includes Boston, one of the largest cities in the country, but it also contains smaller cities as well as suburban, rural, and coastal communities," O'Toole wrote. "It stretches the imagination to suggest that an impartial jury cannot be successfully selected from this large pool of potential jurors."
In the same ruling, O'Toole pushed back the trial's Nov. 3 start date at the defendant's request. The trial will now begin Jan. 5.
Defense attorneys had asked to have the trial moved to Washington, D.C., and delayed until at least September 2015.
Prosecutors say 21-year-old Tsarnaev and his now-deceased older brother placed two pressure cooker bombs that exploded near the marathon's finish line last year. Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured.
Tsarnaev could face the death penalty if convicted.
Contributing; Associated Press
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1srfq1j
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1qw64d1
0 comments:
Post a Comment