By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) – A federal appeals court on Thursday directed a trial judge to assess whether two jurors in Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s 2015 trial were biased and should not have been seated, creating grounds to potentially overturn his death sentence.
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stopped short of granting Tsarnaev’s latest bid to overturn his death sentence for his role in the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded 260 others.
But on a 2-1 vote, the panel concluded that a trial judge did not adequately investigate Tsarnaev’s claims of juror bias. Tsarnaev had argued that two jurors at his trial lied about whether they discussed the case on social media before being seated.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Leslie Adler)
