Lawyers for convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are asking for recordings of police interviews with a Chechen man who was killed in 2013 during a confrontation with the FBI.
Tsarnaev's defense team sought to introduce the recordings during his 2015 trial, saying they would show that he was manipulated by his older brother Tamerlan, who was killed by police after the bombing. But a federal judge denied their request.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a Chechen, faces a death sentence and has appealed his conviction. His lawyers have been preparing arguments for sparing his life and asked a U.S. appeals court on July 3 to release the sealed recordings of police interviews with Ibragim Todashev, who knew Tamerlan.
Todashev, also a Chechen, allegedly told police about a month after the marathon bombing that he and Tamerlan killed three men in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 2011.
Todashev talked about his relationship with Tamerlan under questioning by the police and the FBI. A suspect in the triple homicide, he was later fatally shot when he charged at an FBI agent in Orlando, Florida.
The younger Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for setting off the two bombs at the marathon finish line in April 2013 that killed three spectators. He currently is imprisoned at a U.S. Supermax prison in Colorado.
Tamerlan died during a confrontation with police in Watertown, Massachusetts, days after the bombings.