Jury selection and voir dire for the trial of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will resume on Wednesday after another postponement caused by the recent snowy weather.
On Tuesday evening, Tsarnaev’s defense team filed yet another attempt to stay jury selection and relocate the trial out of Boston, this time petitioning a federal appeals judge instead of presiding Judge George O’Toole. The defense’s filing comes hot on the heels of a U.S. District Court of Massachusetts announcement that “barring further weather delays, it is reasonable to think that the voir dire process may be completed by the end of next week.”
If voir dire proceeds unobstructed, the trial proper could conceivably begin Feb. 17 – the Tuesday after Presidents Day. This is the second time the defense asked the court of appeals to issue a writ of mandamus – a means of circumventing a judge’s previous ruling in hopes of ordering him to do make another.
According to Northeastern University School of Law Professor Daniel Medwed, “Mandamus is a rare maneuver that asks a judge, in effect, to ‘prohibit’ the action from proceeding.” Judge O’Toole has denied every request to relocate thus far. Tsarnaev’s defense cited the following as evidence to support their attempt to relocate:
- the perceived victimization of the greater Boston area and beyond by the Marathon bombings and related events;
- the actual impact of those events on potential jurors and the communities in which they live;
- the connections and linkages between potential jurors and people involved in the Marathon or directly and indirectly affected by the bombings and related events;
- the pretrial publicity engendered by those events and other events linked to them by the media.
On Monday the defense tried to use the highly publicized Boston Marathon finish line shoveler, Chris Laudani, as an example that the level of public feeling has “beset the jury selection process so far.”
Laudani, who ran the 2013 Boston Marathon as a bandit (one who does not qualify or raise the necessary funds), told Boston magazine he shoveled snow off the finish line during a blizzard because “I love the Boston Marathon and everything it stands for, the finish line doesn’t deserve to be covered in snow.”
With the start of the trial finally in sight, the mandamus filing could be one of the final attempts to hold the legal proceedings elsewhere in hopes of receiving a more impartial jury and unbiased trial, if not the last. “Where, as here, prejudice and personal connections are so pervasive,” the filing notes further, “the remnants from which a jury can be cobbled together are not representative of the community in any sense and the risk of seating jurors who want to be selected to pursue personal goals of conviction and punishment is simply too high.” But according to Medwed, a mandamus is “seldom granted.”
To date, Judge O’Toole has questioned 114 prospective jurors over the past nine days. The court hopes to proceed at a clip of about 20 potential jurors per day moving forward.
