Jury begins deliberating life or death for Boston bomber
In closing argument, defense lawyer says Tsarnaev is not ‘the worst of the worst.’
The jury in the Boston Marathon bombing trial completed its first day of deliberations Wednesday, seeking what the judge described as the “proper punishment” for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Prosecutors called for a death sentence for “killing innocents,” and defense lawyers urged the jury “to choose life.”
The jury deliberated for about an hour Wednesday after hearing the closing arguments from both sides.
“No remorse, no apology,” Steven Mellin, a prosecutor from the Department of Justice’s capital case section in Washington, said of Tsarnaev. He described the defendant as “a terrorist who felt justified for what he thought was doing the right thing, killing innocents.”
Mellin described the loss suffered by one family at the marathon’s finish line on April 15, 2013: Martin Richard, 8, bled to death; his sister Jane, 6, lost a leg; their mother, Denise Martin, was blinded in one eye.
Tsarnaev “didn’t care because death and misery was what he sought that day,” Mellin said. “There is no just punishment for that, other than death.”
Defense lawyer Judy Clarke spoke next. “I come before you and ask you to choose life,” she said as she opened her appeal to the jury.
“I’m not asking you to excuse him; there are no excuses. I’m not asking you for sympathy. Our sympathies lie with those who suffered,” she said. “I’m asking you to try to understand how the unimaginable occurred.”
Clarke spoke of Tsarnaev as the youngest brother in a dysfunctional family and described how his parents doted on his elder brother, Tamerlan, and ignored the shy and withdrawn Dzhokhar. She recalled how his mother and brother became radicalized, while his father suffered from mental trauma.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not the worst of the worst, and that’s what the death penalty is reserved for, the worst of the worst,” she said.
The jury of seven women and five men has two options: Death at the federal execution chamber in Indiana or life with no parole in a solitary cell at the “supermax” prison in Colorado. They are expected to return Thursday morning for further deliberations.
Tsarnaev, 21, a Russian immigrant, was convicted last month of all 30 charges in the bombings that killed three people and wounded more than 260. Separately, a young officer at MIT was shot dead in his patrol car during the manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers.