Hearing on Boston Marathon bomber's retrial motion set for December 1

By Valerie Vande Penne

BOSTON (Reuters) - A federal court in Massachusetts set Dec. 1 as the date to hear a motion by lawyers for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev seeking a new trial in the deadly bombing at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon.

On Friday, Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. scheduled the hearing in U.S. District Court in Boston in response to a motion filed by Tsarnaev's lawyers during the summer.

According to court documents filed in August, the attorneys will argue Tsarnaev deserves to be retried outside of Massachusetts because the intense publicity surrounding the case unfairly influenced the 12 jurors.

In April, the jury found Tsarnaev, 22, guilty of carrying out the bombing and then voted to have him executed. The conviction came two years after the attack, which killed three people, injured 264 and stunned the city.

Before the trial, federal judges repeatedly rejected similar arguments by Tsarnaev's lawyers that intense media coverage would prevent an impartial jury from being seated in Boston.

Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan, 26, both ethnic Chechens who prosecutors said had embraced militant Islam, planted two homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the race's crowded finish line and three days later fatally shot a university police officer as they prepared to flee the Boston area. Tamerlan died following a gunfight with police.

Tsarnaev currently is being held at the U.S. penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, home to the "Supermax" unit that houses high-risk prisoners, including Oklahoma City bomber accomplice Terry Nichols, underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

(Additional reporting by Scott Malone in Boston; Editing by Bill Trott)