Judge instructs jury in Boston bombings trial

BOSTON, April 6, (Agencies): The federal judge presiding over the Boston bombings trial on Monday instructed the jury who will deliberate on whether to convict 21-yearold Dzhokhar Tsarnaev over the deadly 2013 attacks.

Three people were killed and 264 others wounded in the twin blasts at the city’s marathon — the worst attack in the United States since the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Tsarnaev, a Muslim American of Chechen descent who was a teenage student at the time of the attacks, faces the death penalty if convicted.

Judge George O’Toole outlined the law to the 18-person jury, explaining each element of 30 separate counts related to the attacks, the murder of a police officer, a car jacking and a shootout with police while on the run.

Seventeen of those charges carry the possibility of the death penalty under federal law. Three of the 30 charges are conspiracy and 27 are substantive offenses. Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to all.

“Consider these instructions sensibly... these instructions will be lengthy but we will give you a written copy of them for the jury room,” O’Toole said in the US district court.

“Because some of the offenses in this case are rather involved... let me begin by giving you a bit of an introduction to federal criminal law.”

After his instructions, O’Toole said lawyers for the prosecution and defense would make their closing statements, before he advises the jury further on how they should consider the evidence.

That will mark the end of the first phase of the one-month trial, which began on March 4.

Executed

If Tsarnaev is convicted, the trial will enter a second stage when the jury determines whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life behind bars without parole — the only sentencing options available.

Tsarnaev, wearing an opennecked button-down shirt and dark blazer, sat with his head of dark, unruly curls bowed deeply over the defense table as the judge read his instructions.

Government prosecutors took four weeks to build their case, calling 92 witnesses in an effort to paint Tsarnaev as an active and willing bomber.

They portrayed a cold, callous killer — a marijuana-smoking, laid-back student who had recently failed a number of exams and become an avid reader of the Islamist literature that investigators found on his computer.

The defense called just four witnesses. Lawyer Judy Clark admitted he was responsible for the bombings, telling jurors in her opening statement: “It was him.”

Her team sought to portray Tsarnaev’s elder brother Tamerlan — shot dead by police while on the run — as the architect of the bombings, arguing that his younger sibling had fallen helplessly under his influence.

Government prosecutors say Tsarnaev carried out the attacks to avenge the deaths of fellow Muslims overseas after learning how to build pressure-cooker bombs through an Al-Qaeda publication.

Eight-year-old Martin Richard, Krystle Campbell, 29, and Lingzi Lu, 23, were killed in the bombings.

Martin’s blood-stained clothing last week was shown to jurors, some of whom were unable to hold back tears. The boy suffered a massive wound to the abdomen, along with burns.

Jurors were also shown a video of Tsarnaev casually buying milk just 30 minutes after the bombings and a message he left in a boat, the bolthole where he was arrested four days after the attacks.

The scrawled writing appeared to justify the attacks by criticizing the US government over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.