Marathon Bomber lawyer faces daunting task
BOSTON — Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s attorney is renowned for keeping her high-profile clients off death row, but Judy Clarke could face her most daunting challenge yet in trying to save the Boston Marathon bomber from execution.
Most of Clarke’s past successes hinged on persuading prosecutors to take the death penalty off the table before their cases ever reached a jury. She accomplished that on behalf of such killers as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph and Arizona mass shooter Jared Loughner.
With Tsarnaev, Clarke doesn’t have that option.
A federal jury convicted Tsarnaev of all 30 charges against him Wednesday and found him responsible for the deaths of the three people killed in the 2013 attack and the killing of an MIT police officer three days later. The same jurors will begin hearing evidence next week on what his punishment should be. They have only two choices: life in prison or execution.
Clarke has had some success in persuading juries that someone who committed a horrific crime should be allowed to live. In 1995, a jury in South Carolina spared the life of Susan Smith, who drowned her two young sons by sending her car into a lake with the boys buckled in their car seats.
Prosecutors said Smith killed her children because she saw them as an impediment to being with a man who had broken off their relationship. But Clarke told the jury about a history of trauma in her life: Her father committed suicide when she was six, she was molested by her stepfather and she made two suicide attempts as a teenager. Clarke called Smith “one of the walking wounded” and asked the jury to see her as a human being with flaws.
It worked. The jury refused to sentence Smith to death.
Clarke also helped defend Zacarias Moussaoui, often called “the 20th hijacker” for his role in planning the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Moussaoui’s life was spared when one juror held out and refused to vote for death.
“The goal for her is to humanize Tsarnaev,” said David Hoose, a death penalty lawyer who won a life sentence for Massachusetts nurse Kristen Gilbert after she was convicted of killing four patients.