Will There Be a Retrial for Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?

On April 21st, one week after the Boston 2013 Marathon bombing, locals come to Boylston Street's improvised memorials in Boston, MA, to pay respect and leave mementos on April 21, 2013. Photo: Marcio Jose Bastos Silva | Shutterstock.com.

Defense lawyers for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said in court on Monday, August 17^th, that Tsarnaev deserves a new trial in a different location, outside of Boston, where jurors will be impartial. His defense argues that his trial will not be able to find unbiased jurors in Boston, where public sentiment rallies strongly against Tsarnaev through news, social media channels, banners around Boston, and even a new city holiday.

But will the request for a new trial go through? In May of this year, former US Attorney Kendall Coffey and Steve Malzberg discussed the case on Malzberg’s show, where Coffey explained that this case has been much more streamlined and moved more quickly than other federal death penalty cases. In the show segment, Coffey suggested that while the appeals process for other cases like this could be 12 to 15 years, he did not anticipate Tsarnaev’s process to go on for more than five.

While most successful retrial requests for these kinds of cases concern the defense’s ability to adequately represent their clients, Coffey acknowledges that Tsarnaev’s defense lawyer “did everything humanly and imaginably possible to save the client’s life.” However, the evidence against Tsarnaev is so overwhelming that the defense did not even dispute his guilt. Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 federal charges; three people died in the bombings and another 260 were injured.

Coffey argues that Tsarnaev’s case is a “death penalty case,” given the magnitude and horror of his crimes, coupled with his lack of remorse for the bombings. Coffey does not believe that bias among the case’s jurors will be a problem because they will follow the law and look only at the evidence.

The appeals court agrees that Boston is a reasonable place for the trial to be held, despite public opinion; other options for appeal requests are running low for Tsarnaev’s defense. It may prove very difficult for the defense to demonstrate the necessity of a new trial, and a long appeals process may not do the case any good.

While there is no death penalty in the state of Massachusetts, Tsarnaev’s case is federal, which means that the death penalty is on the table as an option for the case’s final verdict.