BOSTON — During the days after bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon in 2013, killing and maiming people who had gathered to cheer on runners, a restaurant manager from Dorchester joined the chorus of heartbreak and outrage on Twitter.
“:-( RIP little man,” wrote the woman, who used the handle HerLadyship, of an 8-year-old boy from her neighborhood who had been killed. She sympathized with Twitter friends forced to “shelter in place” during the manhunt, but also said “it’s worse having to work knowing your family is locked down!”
When a 19-year-old named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested after the attack, HerLadyship retweeted a post from someone who praised “all of the law enforcement professionals who went through hell to bring in that piece of garbage.”
More than six years later, those casual posts — by the woman who became the forewoman of Mr. Tsarnaev’s jury — could become the basis for reversing his death sentence.
At an appeal hearing on Thursday, a panel of federal judges raised sharp questions about whether Judge George A. O’Toole, who presided over Mr. Tsarnaev’s trial in 2015, had adequately screened jurors for bias.
They zeroed in on a moment when Judge O’Toole learned that two sitting jurors had failed to disclose tweets and Facebook posts about Mr. Tsarnaev, and opted not to question them in detail about it or remove them from the jury.
“It’s just very puzzling,” said Judge William J. Kayatta Jr., in remarks to a government prosecutor. “You have a defendant who is clearly guilty of this heinous crime and you then stretch and don’t try to follow the rules that we’ve laid down for a trial.”
The line of questioning was echoed by Judge Ojetta Rogeriee Thompson, who asked why the judge did not screen jurors in detail about where they received information about Mr. Tsarnaev.
“Why isn’t this the kind of case that would require probing that kind of information,” she said, “such that not doing so, even if it’s not an abuse of law, is simply an abuse of discretion because the circumstances simply require it?”
Their questions offered a grain of hope to Mr. Tsarnaev’s defense team, which has argued that it was impossible to select an impartial jury in Boston, a city that had been steeped in powerful emotions over the bombings and deluged with pretrial publicity.
The federal death sentence was a rare event in Massachusetts, which has no death penalty for state crimes.
Mr. Tsarnaev and his older brother set down two pressure-cooker bombs packed with nails and BBs in a crowd that had gathered to cheer on marathon runners on April 13, 2013.
The bombs killed three people and injured 260 more, many of them grievously. Seventeen people lost limbs. A fourth person, a law enforcement officer, was killed a few days later as the brothers were fleeing.
Ahead of the trial, two years later, Judge O’Toole denied three motions for a change of venue, arguing that he could easily select impartial jurors from a pool of five million people.
The defense has argued that two jurors had clearly demonstrated prejudice against Mr. Tsarnaev.
Before the trial, Juror 286, a restaurant manager who was chosen as forewoman of the jury, had tweeted or retweeted 22 posts about the bombing, including the one that described Mr. Tsarnaev as “a piece of garbage,” Mr. Tsarnaev’s lawyers say. Efforts by The New York Times to reach the forewoman were unsuccessful.
Juror 138, a man who worked for the Peabody Water Department, had posted on Facebook that he was in the jury pool for the case. One friend wrote that “if you’re really on jury duty, this guys got no shot in hell.” Another wrote, “play the part so u get on the jury then send him to jail where he will be taken care of.”
On the day of sentencing, the defense team’s brief said, Juror 138 said on Twitter that Mr. Tsarnaev was “scum” and “trash,” and that he belonged in a “dungeon where he will be forgotten about until his time comes.” The former juror declined a request for comment from The Times.
Thursday’s arguments represent the first step in a process that will probably last for years. The arguments are constrained to the trial record, and must establish that the judge or prosecutors erred in some way that is significant enough to merit a reversal, a high bar since judges are typically granted broad discretion.
Discussions of the legal questions returned again and again to social media, and the increasing difficulty of sealing off jurors from prejudicial information.
Daniel Habib, a lawyer for Mr. Tsarnaev, said the screening rules are from an era before social media, and are even more necessary now, when potential jurors are immersed in “all manner of opinion and fact and suggestion and innuendo about this case.”
“It wasn’t just that they were reading The Boston Globe,” Mr. Habib said. “They were hearing from their family and their friends and complete strangers on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, and any other social media they participated in, thoughts about the case and beliefs about Tsarnaev.”
Sources of pretrial publicity, he said, “have multiplied, and are less checked.”
Prosecutors have pushed back against the defense arguments, saying that Juror 138 “never endorsed” the “flippant and joking remarks” left by his friends on Facebook, and that Juror 286 may have failed to disclose her Twitter posts because she misunderstood the instruction.
George Vien, a former federal prosecutor who now works at the law firm Donnelly, Conroy & Gelhaar, said he did not believe that the evidence of prejudice was strong.
“I think everyone should stay off social media, but I don’t find it compelling,” he said. “If you look at the overwhelming evidence against him, and all the aggravating factors, it’s easy to understand why an impartial jury would have come down on the side of the death penalty.”
One of the jurors, Kelley A. McCarthy, said in an interview that she believed that the jury had been open-minded and had not been biased by media coverage about the bombings.
“That was one thing the judge was very careful about, that there wasn’t that bias,” she said. “I think we did it fairly, rationally.”
She said she was surprised to learn of social media posts by the forewoman, and said that the forewoman had not had a significant influence on other members of the jury.
“She was not a huge influencer on that trial,” she said. “I mean every single person on the trial had their own free will, and she wasn’t somebody who was persuading anybody, other than what the facts were.”
Liz Norden, the mother of two men who lost legs in the bombing, said a reversal of the verdict or sentence would be a bitter disappointment.
“I think he got a fair trial,” she said. “His defense attorney said he did it. He said he did it. There was no place in the world where you could take it where it would be different. He terrorized a nation.”
Ms. Norden, who is 57, said seeing Mr. Tsarnaev executed is “my only hope in life now.”
“For the human part of me, it’s a sad situation to wish death on anyone,” she said. “That’s not in my makeup. I’m not an eye for an eye. But in this instance, I felt from Day 1 if he was found guilty, that’s what I wanted. That’s what I thought justice would be.”
She added, “I personally hope I live long enough to see it.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
"marathon" - Google News
December 12, 2019 at 10:12PM
https://ift.tt/36sWV23
Jurors’ Social Media Accounts Under Scrutiny in Boston Marathon Bombing Appeal - The New York Times
"marathon" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2qmOhms
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Jurors’ Social Media Accounts Under Scrutiny in Boston Marathon Bombing Appeal - The New York Times"
Post a Comment