BOSTON — Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wants the court to reconsider removing the judge overseeing the lengthy legal battle over his death sentence.
Last month, a three-judge panel rejected Tsarnaev’s bid to remove U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole, who in 2015 declined to investigate alleged juror bias related to social media activity.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers have now requested an en banc hearing.
The defense’s request for an en banc hearing means that all 10 active First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals judges would need to revisit the decision.
This could potentially lead to Tsarnaev’s death sentence being changed to life imprisonment.
In the July ruling that shot down Tsarnaev’s initial bid to remove O’Toole, the three-judge panel determined that the defense failed to prove that keeping O’Toole on the case would cause irreparable harm to the convicted killer’s ongoing appeals.
“We ask whether a reasonable person, fully informed of all the relevant facts, would fairly question the trial judge’s impartiality,” the judges wrote in their denial of the request.
Tsarnaev has been trying to overturn his death sentence, arguing that two jurors lied during questioning.
O’Toole presided over the trial where Tsarnaev was convicted and sentenced to death. This latest ruling is a setback in his efforts to challenge the fairness of his trial.
As long as O’Toole remains on the case, Tsarnaev’s appeals will continue under the same judicial oversight, as he seeks to have his death sentence overturned.
Defense lawyers have argued that Tsarnaev had fallen under the influence of his older brother, Tamerlan, who died in a gun battle with police a few days after the April 15, 2013, bombing.
Tsarnaev was convicted of all 30 charges against him, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction, and the killing of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Officer Sean Collier during the Tsarnaev brothers’ getaway attempt.
Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China, Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford, and 8-year-old Martin Richard, of Boston, all died in the bombing.
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