Court rejects delay in Tsarnaev trial; jury selection from a pool of 3,000 people to start Monday

The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit today denied a motion by Dzokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers to delay his trial to let them argue why the trial should be moved somewhere else.

The 2-1 ruling means jury selection starts Monday in a case that could mean the death penalty for the Cambridge resident accused of helping to carry out the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and of murdering an MIT police officer.

In his own ruling yesterday denying the request for a change of venue - again - US District Court Judge George O'Toole, Jr. said he found it hard to believe impartial jurors could not be found in a region with millions of residents. He pointed to the case of Tsarnaev pal Robel Phillipos, who managed to get a jury for his trial for making false statements in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing investigation in October.

Some 1,200 residents of eastern Massachusetts have been summoned for potential jury duty over the coming week, with another 1,800 told to be ready just in case 18 jurors don't emerge from a process that will include a 100-question questionnaire and questioning by the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys.

In his ruling, O'Toole wrote that even if he accepted the argument by Tsarnaev's lawyers that anybody who lives in Boston, Watertown and Cambridge, their families and friends, people who watched the Marathon and their families and friends, along with first responders and hospital doctors and nurses and their families and friends should automatically be excluded - which he said he did not:

[T]he Eastern Division is large and diverse. It certainly includes Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown - each of which contains a "diverse cross-section of ethnicities, backgrounds, and experiences" - but it is also a large district expanding significantly beyond those specific communities.

While two of the three appellate judges saw no reason to grant Tsarnaev's lawyers time to make their case to them, Judge Juan Torruella said the amount of time between Tsarnaev's request for a review yesterday and today was too short to adequately consider the issues raised by it, especially given that that it's a death penalty case and that Tsarnaev's lawyers had filed roughly 9,500 pages of documents:

Because of these difficulties, I am not in a position to intelligently opine as to whether the standard for mandamus relief has been satisfied. What I do know is that Tsarnaev's argument that the entire city of Boston and its surrounding areas were victimized - as evidenced by the city's virtual lockdown and the images of SWAT team members roaming the streets and knocking door-to-door in Watertown - is compelling.