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 Gary Lee Sampson in 2003 was sentenced to death in federal court
to murdering two men who had picked him up while he was hitchhiking
and later killing a third man after he fled to New Hampshire. But
his sentence was overturned in 2011 by a judge after it emerged one
of the jurors had lied about prior dealings with law enforcement.
Defense lawyers argued in court filings before Wednesday's hearing
that the intense publicity surrounding Sampson's case, as well as
the recent trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who
was also sentenced to death by lethal injection, would make it
impossible to seat an impartial jury in Boston.
Sampson's lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf to move his
trial to Washington, D.C., or New York.
 More than three decades have passed since Massachusetts lawmakers
abolished the death penalty as a punishment for crimes prosecuted in
state courts.
Federal juries in the state have considered just three capital cases
in the past few decades - those of Tsarnaev, Sampson and a nurse
found guilty of killing patients but not sentenced to death in 2001.
Extensive mentions of Sampson's death penalty case in news accounts
of the Tsarnaev trial make it highly unlikely that potential jurors
will not know the 55-year-old former drifter had previously been
sentenced to death, his lawyers argued.
"The principal danger at issue here is that the jury will
impermissibly rely on the result of the 2003 penalty phase trial,"
they wrote in court papers.
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Tsarnaev's attorneys had also argued, unsuccessfully, that his trial
should have been moved out of Boston, citing the intense media
coverage of the 2013 bombing that killed three people and injured
264.
Prosecutors argued that Sampson's second sentencing hearing should
be held in Massachusetts, since that is where he tortured and killed
Philip McCloskey and Jonathan Rizzo in the carjacking. Sampson
killed Robert Whitney in New Hampshire.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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