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 U.S. District Judge George O'Toole agreed last month to hear
defense attorneys' arguments about a federal sentencing law that
applied additional prison time for crimes committed while in
possession of a firearm. The Supreme Court found it overly broad two
days after Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Defense lawyers are also asking that rules put in place ahead of the
trial providing them with privacy to communicate with their client
be left intact as they prepare for appeal.
The defense in August asked that Tsarnaev be re-tried outside
Boston, saying the intense publicity surrounding the attack and the
trial unfairly influenced the 12 jurors who found their client
guilty and sentenced him to death.
 Tsarnaev, 22, is being held at the "Supermax" high security prison
in Florence, Colorado, while his attorneys appeal his death
sentence. He is not expected to be present in court, according to a
spokeswoman for federal prosecutors.
He was last seen in public on June 24, when he said he was "sorry
for the lives I have taken." His older brother, Tamerlan, who
participated in the April 15, 2013 attack, died following a gun
battle with police three days after the bombing.
In addition to killing three people with homemade pressure-cooker
bombs that the brothers learned to make from an al Qaeda
publication, the two shot dead a university police officer as they
tried to flee the city.
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Martin Richard, 8, Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 26, and
restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, died in the bombing. Three
days later the Tsarnaevs shot dead Massachusetts Institute of
Technology police officer Sean Collier, 26.
The legal wrangling over Tsarnaev's fate could play out for years,
if not decades. Just three of the 74 people sentenced to death in
the United States for federal crimes since 1998 have been executed.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Dan Grebler)
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