As penalty phase begins, Tsarnaev still a mystery
BOSTON — Each morning around 9 a.m., a courtroom door would swing open and a young man in a sport coat was escorted by beefy U.S. marshals to the defense table.
For a few moments, the 21-year-old defendant appeared animated, smiling a bit with lawyers, fussing with his thick, dark hair.
But once the jury arrived and the judge gaveled the trial to order, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became someone totally different — detached, dismissive and difficult to read.
Gone was the smile. During hours of testimony, Tsarnaev mostly looked down, fingering through a few notebooks or doodling on a yellow pad. He sometimes sank deeper in his chair, his chin in his hand, looking bored and disinterested, even during heart- wrenching stories from victims of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.
Rarely did Tsarnaev look at the witnesses directly in front of him, some in wheelchairs or prosthetics. He never seemed to view the jurors, either, even when they declared him guilty of the worst terror attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
Little has come out — either in direct testimony or courtroom behavior — about how Tsarnaev feels about the attack that killed three people and injured 260.
That could be about to change.
When the penalty phase of the trial opens Tuesday, prosecutors are likely to offer new details about Tsarnaev’s embrace of violent Islamic radicalism and anti-Americanism. His lawyers likely will respond by calling old friends and associates to portray the immigrant from Russia as a troubled college student, lured away from typical youthful pursuits like Facebook and Twitter by a domineering older brother who masterminded the attack.
“The sentencing phase is going to be fascinating,” said J. Reid Meloy, a San Diego psychologist and longtime criminal consultant. “You’re going to hear from doctors about his history and you’ll get a tremendous amount of data. The doors are going to be thrown wide open on him.”
Does he feel remorse? Is he still devoted to Islam? Does he believe his brother led him astray? And perhaps most important, does he want to live or die?
From his actions and attitudes in court, it’s hard to even know if Tsarnaev supports his own legal team’s defense strategy, though he does not appear to be trying to sabotage it.
Unless Tsarnaev takes the stand — and there has been no indication he will — the jury of seven women and five men may never know the answers to those questions.
Bernard Kleinman, a New York criminal defense lawyer who represented the first World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef, said the greatest challenge for Tsarnaev’s lawyers will be to bring him to life in the courtroom, to show what lead defense lawyer Judy Clarke likes to call “the whole person.”
Her legal strategy in this case and previous ones has been to present her clients as ordinary or troubled individuals who made one big, terrible mistake. But Tsarnaev’s inscrutability may be alienating some jurors.
“I always sit my clients as close in a chair to the jury as they can get,” Kleinman said. “You want them to look at him in civilian clothing and see that he isn’t detached, that he is writing notes to you, glancing at the jury and really participating. You want to humanize him because you know the government is certainly going to dehumanize him.”
In the Boston trial, some fleeting images have surfaced regarding Tsarnaev. Prosecutors put on testimony about his Web searches for violent jihad propaganda and bombmaking. His lawyers countered by highlighting his searches for girls and cars, what defense attorney Miriam Conrad called “normal interests” for a then-19year-old male.
Immediately after the bombings, however, he demonstrated he could mask himself by pretending to be a concerned resident, urging people to remain calm. “I’m a stress free kind of guy,” he tweeted.