Jury selection will continue for the trial of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, amidst requests for delays from the suspect’s defense team.
Accused of placing two bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and killing Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to the 30 federal counts against him, The Daily Free Press reported.
The first of the delays requested by Tsarnaev’s defense team was presented in June, proposing the trial be moved away from Boston, citing the inability to find an impartial jury. The request was denied by U.S. Federal District Court Judge George A. O’Toole Jr., the FreeP reported on June 19.
The latest request for a delay on behalf of the defense team was filed Jan. 13, following the Jan. 7 shooting at Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine in France, that killed 12 people.
“This measure would allow some time for the extraordinary prejudice flowing from these events — and the comparison of those events to those at issue in this case — to diminish,” the defense team said in its request for a delay of jury selection.
The defense team cited parallels drawn by media outlets such as CNN, the Boston Herald and USA Today.
“These parallels so widely expressed cannot be lost on potential jurors,” the file stated. “Even though the panels have been instructed not to read media reports about this case, the probability of exposure to reports of the Paris events, which began before all of the jurors were instructed, is exceedingly high.”
O’Toole rejected the request, and jury selection will continue this week, following a chosen pool of approximately 1,300 individuals. After filling out a highly detailed questionnaire, individual interviews of potential jurors began on Jan. 15.
Robert Keefe, a partner at Boston-based WilmerHale law firm and a former colleague of O’Toole’s, spoke highly of the judge and his ability to appoint a fair and impartial jury.
“He’s very smart. He’s very thoughtful,” Keefe said. “He does not make rash decisions and he thinks everything out.”
O’Toole’s extensive background, Keefe said, highly qualifies him to preside over such a case.
“He has terrific judicial temperament, and he treats everyone with respect,” Keefe said. “You have to know his full career. As a result, given all that experience and background, it leads up to him to try a case like this and be fair to everyone.”
Paul Gugliuzza, associate professor at Boston University’s School of Law, said many of the details with this case make it different than others.
“Everything with this case is going to take much longer than in most other cases, and the reason for that is that the stakes are so high in this case, and there’s great public interest in this case,” he said.
Gugliuzza said there are a variety of advantages and disadvantages to having the trial in Boston, where the bombing occurred.
“The disadvantage would seem to be that you’re going to have to go through a very large number of jurors before you can confidently whittle it down to a jury of 12 that the judge and both sides are convinced will be impartial,” he said. “If you move the trial further away, where people were less intimately impacted by the case and also where there’s less media coverage of the case, you might be able to find 12 impartial jurors from a smaller pool.”
The option of the death penalty, Gugliuzza said, also influences jury selection and the overall proceedings of a complex case such as this one.
“The other difficulty with having this trial in Boston is that to sit on a jury of a case in which the death penalty is a possibility, all of the jurors must be willing to impose the death penalty,” he said. “In a state like Massachusetts that doesn’t have the death penalty, you’re going to find a lot of jurors who simply aren’t qualified for the jury because they’re not willing to impose the death penalty.”
Keefe said fairness is of the utmost importance in a high-profile case, such as this one.
“You have to be fair to the government, you have to be fair to the defendant, you have to be fair to the victims, you have to be fair to the public, and you have to be fair to the jury,” Keefe said. “Judge O’Toole is trying to be as fair as possible.”
As the proceedings continue, Gugliuzza predicts the verdict will not be one of guilty or not guilty, but rather whether or not Tsarnaev is deserving of the death penalty.
“For the defense, the main goal is to try to humanize him a little bit,” he said. “Even as they’re presenting whatever case they might have for why he should not be convicted at all, I still think that presentation is going to be colored with the acknowledgement that really avoiding the death sentence would be sort of a victory for the defendant in this case.”
