Tsarnaev, who was nineteen at the time of his crime and twenty-one when he was sentenced, was tried in Boston after he and his older brother Tamerlan set off two homemade explosive devices during the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring two hundred and sixty-four.
Judge O’Toole held that “presumption of innocence” is “a term of art” that doesn’t actually mean that jurors must presume the defendant to be innocent. The appeals court, in vacating the death sentence, agreed with Clarke that O’Toole should have questioned jurors in detail.
On Friday, a panel of three federal judges vacated the death sentence in the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, who has been on death row for five years. The court unanimously concluded that Tsarnaev did not receive a fair trial. “A core promise of our criminal-justice system is that even the very worst ...