A federal appeals court Friday threw out Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying the judge who oversaw the case did not adequately screen jurors for potential biases.A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new penalty phase trial on whether Tsarnaev, 27, should be executed for the attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.”But make no mistake: Dzhokhar will spend his remaining days locked up in prison, with the only matter remaining being whether he will die by execution,” Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote in the ruling, more than six months after arguments were heard in the case.An email seeking comment was sent to an attorney for Tsarnaev. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston said the office was reviewing the opinion and had no immediate comment.Prosecutors could ask the full appeals court to hear the case or go straight to the U.S. Supreme Court.The mother of Krystle Campbell, the 29-year-old killed in the attack, expressed outrage at the court’s decision.’It’s just terrible'”I just don’t understand it,” Patricia Campbell told The Boston Globe. “It’s just terrible that he’s allowed to live his life. It’s unfair. He didn’t wake up one morning and decide to do what he did. He planned it out. He did a vicious, ugly thing.”Former Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer Dic Donohue, who was severely injured in a gunfight with the brothers, said the ruling was not surprising to him.”And in any case, he won’t be getting out and hasn’t been able to harm anyone since he was captured,” he tweeted.Tsarnaev’s lawyers acknowledged at the beginning of his trial that he and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, set off the two bombs at the marathon finish line. But they argued that Dzhokar Tsarnaev was less culpable than his brother, who they said was the mastermind behind the attack.Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a gunbattle with police a few days after the April 15, 2013, bombing. Dzhokar Tsarnaev is now behind bars at a high-security supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.Tsarnaev was convicted on 30 charges, including conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction.Punishment for USProsecutors told jurors that the men carried out the attack to punish the United States for its wars in Muslim countries. In the boat where Tsarnaev was found hiding, he had scrawled a confession that referred to the wars and wrote, among other things, “Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”Tsarnaev’s attorneys identified a slew of issues with his trial but said in a brief filed with the court that the “first fundamental error” was the judge’s refusal to move the case out of Boston. They also pointed to social media posts from two jurors suggesting they harbored strong opinions before the 2015 trial started.One juror had said in Twitter posts that that she was “locked down” with her family during the manhunt and retweeted another post calling Tsarnaev a “piece of garbage,” but later told the court she had not commented on the case or been asked to shelter in place, the defense said. On the day of Tsarnaev’s sentencing, the juror changed her Facebook profile picture to an image that said “BOSTON STRONG,” a rallying cry used in the wake of the bombing, the attorneys said.Tsarnaev’s lawyers pushed several times to move the trial out of the city where the bombs exploded, arguing the intense media scrutiny and number of people touched by the attack in Boston would taint the jury pool. But U.S. District Judge George O’Toole refused, saying he believed a fair and impartial jury could be found in the city.’Pervasive’ coverageThe 1st Circuit said the “pervasive” media coverage featuring “bone-chilling still shots and videos” of the bombing and dayslong manhunt required the judge to run a jury selection process “sufficient to identify prejudice.” But O’Toole fell short, the judges found.The judges said O’Toole deemed jurors who had already formed the opinion that Tsarnaev was guilty qualified “because they answered ‘yes’ to the question whether they could decide this high-profile case based on the evidence.” Yet he didn’t sufficiently dig into what jurors had read or heard about the case, it said.”By not having the jurors identify what it was they already thought they knew about the case, the judge made it too difficult for himself and the parties to determine both the nature of any taint (e.g., whether the juror knew something prejudicial not to be conceded at trial) and the possible remedies for the taint,” Thompson wrote.All three judges agreed that the death sentence should be tossed.In a concurring opinion, Judge Juan Torruella wrote that the case should never have been tried in Boston.”If this case did not present a sufficient basis for a change of venue, there are no set of circumstances that will meet this standard, at least not in the First Circuit,” he wrote.President Donald Trump weighed in on the ruling during an address to supporters on the tarmac of Tampa International Airport.”I see in Boston, where you have the animal that killed so many people during the Boston Marathon,” Trump said. “They just sent this conviction for the death penalty back to the lower courts so they’ll argue about that for a long time. It’s ridiculous.”
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Canada’s attorney general says the requirements for extraditing Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou to the United States on charges of bank fraud have been met, documents submitted in a British Columbia court show.Meng, 48, was arrested in December 2018 on a warrant from the United States, which alleges that she misled the bank HSBC about Huawei’s business dealings in Iran.Meng has been under house arrest in Vancouver since then, fighting extradition, and has said she is innocent. Her case has caused a diplomatic row between Canada and China, which has demanded that Meng be released. China detained two Canadians after Meng’s arrest.The documents, which were filed last week and released to media Friday, are a precursor to the formal hearing on committal, or whether Meng should be extradited to the United States. Those hearings will take place in April 2021.The documents outline the evidence in support of Meng’s custody and conclude that the test for committal has been met.Assessment of charges’ potentialThe extradition hearings are not a full trial on the charges laid by the United States, the documents state, only whether there is the potential for those charges to be found valid.”The evidence demonstrates that Ms. Meng deliberately made dishonest representations to HSBC in an attempt to preserve Huawei’s relationship with the bank,” lawyers for the Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti wrote.”Since Ms. Meng concedes that she is the person sought for prosecution for the conduct set out in the extradition request, all of the formal requirements for committal are established.”Huawei declined to comment and pointed instead to its past legal submissions on its arguments.In May, a judge in British Columbia’s Superior Court found that the legal standard of double criminality — meaning that Meng’s actions could be considered a crime in both Canada and the United States — had been met, dealing a blow to hopes for a quick end to the trial.The next hearings, scheduled for August 17-21 in Vancouver, will discuss whether the attorney general’s assertion of privilege in declining to release some documents requested by Huawei relating to Meng’s initial arrest is valid.Hearings for the trial are scheduled to wrap up in April 2021, although the potential for appeals of the decision from either side means the case could drag out over several years.
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The Trump administration on Friday announced it would dramatically increase U.S. immigration fees in multiple categories, including a first-ever fee for asylum applicants and an 80% increase for naturalization services.The new fee structure, unveiled by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), is expected to take effect October 2. The cost of online naturalization applications is increasing from $640 to $1,160. There will also be a $50 fee for asylum-seekers.The agency, which has closed offices and suspended most services during the pandemic, has said it faces a significant revenue shortfall that could trigger furloughs. Earlier this year, the agency requested $1.2 billion in emergency funds from Congress.“USCIS is required to examine incoming and outgoing expenditures and make adjustments based on that analysis,” Joseph Edlow, USCIS deputy director for policy, said in a statement to the press. He added, “These overdue adjustments in fees are necessary to efficiently and fairly administer our nation’s lawful immigration system, secure the homeland and protect Americans.”According to USCIS, the new rule supports payroll, technology and operations to accomplish its mission.Experts said the United States now joins Iran, Fiji and Australia in imposing a fee on asylum-seekers. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, a Washington nonprofit that advocates for immigrants, decried the added financial burden on newcomers, who are also charged a fee for an initial work permit.The USCIS fee rule continues the Trump administration’s attacks on asylum seekers:
– First-ever fee ($50) for asylum
– For the first time, requires asylum seekers to pay to apply for an initial work permit, even though they’re not allowed to work before then—at the cost of $550.
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) July 31, 2020Earlier, the agency removed a proposed $275 renewal fee for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipients.U.S. immigration fees have risen dramatically in recent decades. In the 1990s, the fee to apply for naturalization was under $100.USCIS does not operate like most federal agencies as it receives funds mostly from fee collection.
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In a fiery eulogy for longtime U.S. Representative John Lewis on Thursday, former President Barack Obama took a series of thinly veiled shots at the actions of his successor that he said tore at the legacy of the Black civil rights icon being laid to rest.  
 
The funeral for Lewis, who played an instrumental role in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, came on the same day Republican President Donald Trump suggested the Nov. 3 election could be delayed. Trump has also waged a war against mail-in ballots, a tactic critics say is aimed at suppressing votes.
 
“We no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot,” Obama said in the eulogy, referring to one way Black people were once disqualified at the ballot box.
 
“But even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”
 
Obama also referred to reported moves to undermine “the postal service in the run-up to an election that could be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”
 
Obama, joined at the funeral by two fellow former presidents, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, spoke of Lewis’s rise from humble beginnings on a Troy, Alabama, farm to become a leader of the 1960s struggle for equal rights for Black Americans. Ultimately, the man known as the “conscience of Congress” never gave up his drive to make “good trouble” in the cause of justice, Obama said.
 
Obama and others spoke or sang in front of his casket draped in the American flag at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. King, who was assassinated in 1968, had been a mentor to Lewis.
 
Lewis, who was first elected in 1986 to represent Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives, died on July 17 at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. His death came at a time of reckoning across the United States over racial injustice ignited by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.  
 
Obama – a Democrat who was the nation’s first black president and who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 – argued that the man whose sharecropping parents “picked someone else’s cotton” now should be counted among the Founding Fathers.
 
“America was built by John Lewis. He as much as anyone in our history brought our country closer to its highest ideals,” the Democratic former president said.
 
In his speech, Bush remembered joining Lewis in Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the watershed 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “The story that began in Troy isn’t ending here today, nor is the work.”
 
The funeral capped a week of memorial services. Lewis’s coffin was escorted across the bridge on Sunday, decades after his beating there drew a national spotlight to the struggle for racial equality, including suppression of the Black vote in the South. And on Monday his casket was taken to the U.S. Capitol in Washington where it lay in state through Tuesday.
 
Eric Terrell, 65, of Atlanta, sat outside the church in his wheelchair, in the heat and thick air of an Atlanta summer morning, waiting to get a glimpse of former Presidents Clinton and Bush, but especially Obama. He was camped out before 6:30 a.m. so he could bow his head as Lewis’s funeral procession rolled by.
 
And he held his homemade sign until his arms got tired. It read, “Get your ass out and vote.” “He put his life on the line in Selma so we could vote,” said Terrell, who is Black. “So we better do it,” he said before joining the throng of onlookers outside the church watching the services on a Jumbotron.
 
In an essay written shortly before his death and published in the New York Times on Thursday, Lewis called on the younger generation to get into “good trouble,” using perhaps his most famous utterance about the importance of challenging inequality.
 
“In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way,” he wrote, before invoking a famous line from King: “Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
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