BOSTON (AP) — Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-HAHR’ tsahr-NEYE’-ehv) has filed a motion for a new trial, less than two weeks after he was formally sentenced to death for the 2013 attack.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers filed a preliminary motion for a new trial Monday for his conviction and death sentence. The motion did not contain any details on what grounds they plan to argue, saying only that a new trial is “required in the interests of justice.”
The 21-year-old Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 charges in the bombing, which killed three people and injured more than 260. The same jury recommended the death penalty, and a federal judge on June 24 sentenced him to death.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers call the motion a “placeholder” until they can file a more detailed motion next month.
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Well, what do you expect him to do? Say… “Fair enough!” Of course he’s going to exhaust every avenue available to him for appeal and to delay his sentence being carried out. That’s why death penalty cases are so expensive. You have nothing to lose.
And any actions we take to streamline and speed up the process just increases the odds that we’ll put more innocent people to death. So this is basically the system that we’re stuck with as long as we’re going to impose the death penalty.