Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's attorney urged a federal appeals court to throw out the 29-year-old's death sentence.
Tsarnaev is making a renewed push to avoid execution after the Supreme Court last year reinstated the death sentence imposed on him for his role in the bombing that killed three people and injured hundreds near the finish line of the marathon in 2013.
His lawyers are now challenging issues that weren't considered by the Supreme Court, including whether the trial judge wrongly denied his challenge of two jurors who defense attorneys say lied during jury selection questioning.
One juror said she had not commented about the case online but had retweeted a post calling Tsarnaev a "piece of garbage."
Another juror said none of his Facebook friends had commented on the trial, even though one had urged him to "play the part" so he could get on the jury and send Tsarnaev to "jail where he will be taken of," defence attorneys say.
Tsarnaev's lawyers raised those concerns during jury selection, but the judge chose not to look into them further, they say.
The Justice Department has continued to push to uphold Tsarnaev's sentence even after Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 imposed a moratorium on federal executions while the department conducts a review of its policies and procedures.
The department has not indicated how long it might maintain the hold, which came after former President Donald Trump administration's put to death 13 inmates in its final six months.
President Joe Biden has said that he opposes the death penalty and will work to end its use, but he has taken no action to do so while in office.
Some survivors of the bombing attended the hearing on Tuesday.
Marc Fucarile, who lost a leg and suffered other serious injuries in the blast, said he came to the arguments to let the judges know survivors are "still paying attention to what they are doing."
"At a certain point we need to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough. It is not in question what he did," Fucarile said.
Tsarnaev's lawyers acknowledged at the very beginning of his trial that he and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, set off the two bombs that killed Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford, Massachusetts; and 8-year-old Martin Richard, of Boston.
They have argued, however, that he shouldn't be put to death, saying his brother radicalised him and was the mastermind of the attack.
Tsarnaev was convicted in 2015 of all 30 charges against him, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction and the killing of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Officer Sean Collier during the Tsarnaev brothers' getaway attempt.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a gunbattle with police a few days after the April 15, 2013, bombing.
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