BY DENISE LAVOIE AP LEGAL AFFAIRS WRITER 02/26/2015 1:34 PM
Lawyers for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect asked a judge Thursday to dismiss the indictment against their client or suspend his trial, saying there weren’t enough minorities and younger people in the jury pool.
The move by lawyers for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev came just days before opening statements and testimony are set to begin in his federal death penalty trial.
In their written motion, Tsarnaev’s lawyers say the selection process has undermined the required random summoning of potential jurors. …
The defense said 1,373 people, summoned from a population of about 5 million in eastern Massachusetts, were originally given numbers based on a random pool order list. New numbers were later assigned, based on when the jurors reported to court to complete written questionnaires. …
“This re-ordering, apparently based on non-random factors such as arrival time, had systemic effects on the order.” …
For example, a statistician hired by the defense found that the reordering of prospective jurors, on average, pushed the number of black jurors back 43 positions in the order of selection and moved potential white jurors up by three positions. Prospective jurors who live in Boston were pushed back 25 positions, and those under 30 moved back 13 slots, the defense said.
The statistician, comparing the reordered jurors to their original order, found there were no prospective black jurors among the first 94 people in the new order. He said there would have been five potential black jurors if the court had kept the jurors in their original order. …
They also argued that the process did not identify enough prospective black jurors. They said although black people make up 6.14 percent of the population eligible for jury service, they make up only 4.25 percent of the list of names drawn for jury selection. …
Tsarnaev’s lawyers have argued repeatedly that the trial should be moved out of Massachusetts because of the emotional impact the bombings had in the state and because many people have personal connections to the case. …
Jeff Denner, a veteran Boston defense attorney who is not involved in the case, said he doesn’t see a contradiction between the defense push to move the trial out of Massachusetts and its complaint that jurors who live in Boston may have been underrepresented.