text: BOSTON (AP) — Lawyers for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-HAHR' tsahr-NEYE'-ehv) say his trial should have been held outside the city because jurors couldn't avoid widespread outrage over the deadly attack and he deserves a new trial elsewhere. 
   
   A filing by the lawyers on Monday explains their push for a new trial for Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death. 
   
   The filing says even on social media jurors would have seen friends and relatives posting about the 2013 bombing. 
   
   The lawyers argue a recent Supreme Court ruling about the vagueness of the definition of a "crime of violence" throws many convictions into question. The legal term "crime of violence" was applied to Tsarnaev's actions. 
   
   Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 federal charges in the bombing, which killed three people died and injured more than 260. He apologized at his sentencing. ||||| Attorneys for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev appealed his conviction and death sentence on Monday, arguing that publicity made it impossible for him to get a fair trial in the city and that capital punishment is unconstitutional. 
   
   In court papers, defense lawyer William Fick cited a recent dissent by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in which he said that he believes the death penalty "now likely constitutes a legally prohibited 'cruel and unusual punishment.'" 
   
   However, the majority opinion in that very same case opened with the declaration that "capital punishment is constitutional." 
   
   Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in June for helping his older brother carry out the April 15, 2013, blasts that killed three people and injured and maimed more than 200 others. 
   
   The appeal claims that "continuous and unrelenting publicity" about the bombings, the defendant and his family, and wrenching survivor stories prevented him from getting an impartial hearing. It notes that Boston announced a new holiday marking the bombings while jurors were deliberating Tsarnaev's guilt. 
   
   As users of social media, the jurors would have found it impossible to avoid coverage, the appeal argues. 
   
   "Put simply, prejudicial media coverage, events, and environment saturated greater Boston, including the social networks of actual trial jurors, and made it an improper venue for the trial of this case," the court papers say. 
   
   The defense repeatedly asked for a change of venue before the trial began, but the requests were rejected by the judge. ||||| Despite the dramatic news from court, the Boston Marathon bomber’s fate will take years to reach its conclusion: only three of 340 prisoners sentenced to federal death row have been executed in the last 50 years 
   
   Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has become the 62nd inmate on federal death row after he was sentenced to death on Friday for his part in the Boston Marathon bombings. 
   
   He will now join the rarified group of men and women (two are female) awaiting execution on federal death row; at 21 he will be the youngest. 
   
   Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sentenced to death Read more 
   
   But despite the dramatic news from the Boston courtroom on Friday, Tsarnaev’s fate will take years to reach its conclusion. Many of his new federal death row peers have been sitting waiting for the appeals process to work its way out for more than 20 years. 
   
   Though the Justice Department could attempt to fast-track executions in the name of public interest, death penalty experts expect the very quickest timeframe from Friday’s sentence to Tsarnaev actually being put on a gurney and injected with lethal chemicals would be at least 10 years. The prisoner’s team of legal defenders, led by Judy Clarke, have already indicated two strong lines of likely appeal: that on prejudicial grounds the trial should never have been held in Boston where the bombings happened; and that the defense was given insufficient time to mount a full argument in mitigation that might have convinced the jury to spare Tsarnaev from the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana. 
   
   Most capital cases in the US are handled by individual death penalty states, mainly in the deep south, while the involvement of the federal government in America’s most controversial judicial practice has become increasingly unusual in modern times. 
   
   Although a total number of 340 prisoners have been executed by the US government since 1790, in the past 50 years only three have died: Timothy McVeigh in June 2001 for the Oklahoma City bombing; Juan Raul Garza, also in 2001, for a triple drug murder; and convicted rapist and murderer Louis Jones two years later. 
   
   One of the paradoxes about federal death row is that being the responsibility of the US government, it might be assumed to have a national logic in terms of the types of crimes and regions of the country in which it is deployed. But in fact capital punishment has been even more maverick in its application federally than by individual states. 
   
   Almost half of Tsarnaev’s new federal death row peers were put there by just three states: Texas, which has put 11 prisoners there; Missouri, nine; and Virginia, seven. A further 13 states have one inmate each. 
   
   Very few of those individuals fall into the same category as the Boston Marathon bomber, whose involvement in extreme acts of public violence or domestic terrorism brought a genuinely nationwide spotlight on them. Most of the 62 inmates were put there for reasons that seem almost tangential – maybe a murder was conducted on federal land, or the gun used in a shooting was carried across state lines.
target: – Not a huge surprise: Lawyers for Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev today appealed his death-penalty conviction, arguing that "continuous and unrelenting publicity" biased jurors and made a fair trial in Boston impossible, NBC News reports. "Put simply, prejudicial media coverage, events, and environment saturated greater Boston, including the social networks of actual trial jurors, and made it an improper venue for the trial of this case," say the papers. The lawyers want another trial at a new location, the AP reports. Earlier this year, the Guardian reminded us that Tsarnaev's appeals will likely delay his punishment for "at least a decade." The April 15, 2013, bomb strike in Boston left three dead and more than 200 maimed or injured.