Tsarnaev is Guilty of Everything. Now For the Hard Part
Should we kill Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?
The 30 guilty verdicts returned against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev aren’t a surprise.
And legal experts say those rulings will likely have little impact on the next, more unpredictable part of the trial: the sentencing phase. Then, the 12 jurors will decide whether the admitted — and now convicted — Boston Marathon bomber will die by execution or not.
“This was expected,’’ said Andrea Lyon, a capital defense attorney dubbed the “Angel of Death Row’’ by the Chicago Tribune. “Clearly, their strategy has been to focus on the presentation of mitigation and the death penalty phase of this case.’’
Now, Judy Clarke and the rest of the defense team can get to their real work.
“This is what they’ve clearly been planning to do all along,’’ said Lyon, a longtime friend of Clarke’s who talked the now-famous defense attorney into taking her first death penalty case back in 1994. “Trying to save his life by putting on a good sentencing hearing.’’
What the jury told Tsarnaev today is that they believe he was legally culpable for every step of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath — from the manufacture of the bombs, to the placing of the explosives at the finish line, to the killing of Officer Sean Collier and the shooting of Officer Richard Donohue.
But that’s a completely different question than whether he is morally culpable to the point that he should be killed by the government. The jury will be explicitly instructed to consider whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the mastermind, and Dzhokhar the follower.
“The fact that they found him part of a criminal enterprise and responsible for his brother’s behavior in a legal sense seems appropriate,’’ Lyon said. Unknown is “whether they find the same level of moral culpability as his brother.’’
Since Clarke admitted in her opening statement that Tsarnaev was there, that he did what he was accused of, today’s verdict is “eminently predictable,’’ said Martin G. Weinberg, a Boston defense attorney.
“Having conceded guilt from the opening to the closing, today’s verdict has little or nothing to do with how the jury will weigh the open decision of life or death,’’ Weinberg said. “It doesn’t foreshadow the inevitability that this jury will decide to choose the death penalty.’’
In a sense, the penalty phase of the trial has been happening all along, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. The prosecution waited until the last day of testimony to show the most horrific carnage wrought by the Tsarnaev brothers, hoping those memories will linger into the second phase. The defense has picked at the evidence to point the finger at Tamerlan. He bought the supplies. His fingerprints were on the bomb materials. His computer had the radical propaganda on it first.
“None of them are excuses for participation in the offense,’’ Dunham said. “But all of that is presented as mitigating evidence in trying to get the jury to see Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an adolescent who was emotionally immature, who was vulnerable to the influences of his older brother and who acted under the emotional dominance of his older brother.’’
The jury will make their less-predictable decision in the coming weeks.
What Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote in the boat before his capture
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