Defense lawyers for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev yet again asked a judge on Monday to delay the trial, claiming that still more time is needed to prepare.
“Only adequate preparation makes a fair trial possible,” defense lawyers wrote in response to prosecution’s opposition to yet another a trial delay. “But we face a situation where Mr. Tsarnaev is being afforded substantially less time to prepare than the vast majority of defendants in federal capital cases.”
Jury selection is currently scheduled to begin January 5th, but the defense team requested for the trial to be postponed until September.
The defense claimed that the overwhelming amount of evidence requires a delay, noting that more than 19,000 pages of documents as well as spreadsheets and audio files were received just this month.
In addition, the lawyers said that the prosecution has not handed over everything that had been requested, including information that they believe may show that Tsarnaev was under the influence of his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed during a shootout with police days after the bombing.
However, prosecutors had previously said everything required of them had been handed over to the lawyers.
In response, the defense criticized the statements. “The government’s arguments are largely comprised of generalizations that cannot withstand scrutiny and other statements that are simply wrong,” they wrote in the motion filed Monday.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers are attempting to move the trial out of Massachusetts due to intense media coverage surrounding the case. A filing on Monday noted that the marathon bombing aftermath was named as the top Massachusetts news story of 2014.
“The report corroborates the defense analysis showing that intense pretrial publicity has continued unabated,” the defense said.
