Lawyers for alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are attempting to move the high-profile case out of Massachusetts in hopes of receiving a fair trial.
According to a report from the Boston Globe, Tsarnaev’s legal representation are eyeing Washington D.C., after it came to light in a survey that many here in the Bay State already consider the suspect to be guilty, and the preferred punishment to be the death penalty.
The New York Daily News writes that Tsarnaev’s lawyers contend Washington D.C is “reasonably close (to Boston), accessible to witnesses and interested persons, and able to logistically accommodate a trial of this magnitude,” and therefore one of several apt relocation sites.
Another potential municipal venue could be just an hour and half west of Boston at the U.S. District Court in Springfield. MassLive notes that D.C. is actually the farthest option from Boston, while the same survey used to determine that most Bostonians think Tsarnaev is guilty indicates Springfield the second most predisposed location in terms of presumed guilt.
Another option is New York City.
In Boston “37 percent believe Tsarnaev should face the death penalty rather than life without parole if convicted, while 35 percent in Springfield favor death,” writes MassLive. “The number dropped below 30 percent in the out-of-state venues.”
Lawyers compared this case to that of the infamous Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, where 168 people were killed and more than 680 others injured. A judge presiding over that case approved of a change of venue to Denver, Colorado, though the bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was sentenced to death and executed in 2001 by lethal injection.
The motion for a change in venue, which can be read here, suggests that given the sheer volume of Bostonians and others present during the Marathon bombings, the potential for an unreliable ruling is even higher than that of the McVeigh case. It reads:
The community impact here is even greater than that present in [United States v. McVeigh] given that the bombings occurred at the Boston Marathon on the day thousands of Bostonians and others from the region gathered to celebrate the runners, the Red Sox, and Patriots Day,the indelible fear that friends and family could have been killed or injured, the trauma experienced by those in the region for four more days while the police sought the perpetrators, and the hundreds of thousands of Boston area residents who sheltered in place during the climactic final day of the search.
Image via Art Lien
