Boston marathon bombing suspect to appear in court this week

Boston marathon bombing suspect to appear in court this week

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Boston marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is due to appear in court in Boston this week for the first time in more than a year, at a final hearing before his trial begins next month, one of his attorneys said on Monday, Dec 15, the Guardian reports.

Tsarnaev, 21, is charged with killing three people and injuring more than 260 with two homemade pressure-cooker bombs left at the race’s crowded finish line on April 15, 2013. Three days later as Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, attempted to flee the city, federal prosecutors contend that they shot and killed a university police officer.

Tamerlan, 26, died later that night after a gun battle with police and Dzhokhar was arrested on April 19, 2013, when officers found him hiding in a dry-docked boat in a backyard in Watertown, Massachusetts. He faces the death penalty if convicted of the largest mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.

Tsarnaev has not been seen in public since July 2013, when he appeared in U.S. district court in Boston to plead not guilty to 30 criminal counts linked to the attack. At the time, his left arm was in a cast and his face was swollen, signs of injuries sustained during his arrest.

While Tsarnaev has not attended status conferences since that day, it is standard procedure for defendants to attend final pre-trial conferences, one of his attorneys, Miriam Conrad, said.

Three people died in the bombing attack: 29-year-old restaurant manager Krystle Campbell; graduate student Lingzi Lu, 23; and eight-year-old Martin Richard. An MIT police officer, Sean Collier, 27, was killed three days later.

Jury selection in Tsarnaev’s trial is due to begin Jan 5. The trial itself is expected to run two to three months.

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