Nearly two years after three people were murdered and over 260 injured by
a pair of pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line, the accused
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will go on trial for his life. His guilt is not in question
but his attorneys will try to depict the (then) 19-year-old as the victim of
his older brother Tamerlan’s influence.
Tsarnaev faces 30 charges in the bombings and the assassination days
later of a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Seventeen of the charges carry the possibility of the death penalty. His older
brother Tamerlan died in a shootout with the police.
The Boston Herald reports that, in a sideshow bid for sympathy from the jury, Tsarnaev’s legal
team plans to tow into court the entire 24-foot boat in which the fugitive was captured,
so that the jury can appreciate the “context” of that April night in 2013. His
attorneys want them to picture their poor client fearing for his life inside its
blood-stained, bullet-riddled hull as the target of an intense manhunt. “You
can imagine Mr. Tsarnaev lying in the boat as one might lie in a crypt,” said defense
attorney William Fick.
What the jurors should imagine is Tsarnaev’s victims lying in crypts while their surviving family members
grieve. “The bomb tore large chunks of flesh out of [8-year-old] Martin
Richard,” said the prosecutor in his opening statement today, and the boy bled
to death on the sidewalk as his mother looked on helplessly. Martin’s
7-year-old sister lost her leg. His father has significant hearing loss (many
of the victims have perforated eardrums), and his mother lost vision in one eye.
A close friend of the family stated that “the loss of Martin for the Richards is heartbreaking, and it
leaves scars that will absolutely never heal. It tears their heart out, and
nothing is ever going to make it right.”
Perhaps the jurors should imagine what that’s like instead of taking pity
on the 19-year-old jihadist who planted one of the bombs mere feet away from
the Richards family, and then, as the prosecutor told the jury today, stayed to
watch the carnage, then calmly bought milk at a nearby Whole Foods, went back
to school, and played video games.
Or perhaps the jurors could consider 29-year-old Krystle Campbell, who
was also killed in the bombing. A friend who lost her leg that day tearfully testified today that she remembers being hoisted into the air and thrown back by
the bomb blast. When she looked down at her leg, “my bones were literally laying
next to me on the sidewalk.” Her friend Krystle “very slowly said that her legs
hurt,” and the two held hands. “Shortly after that, her hand went limp in mine,
and she never spoke again.”
Perhaps the jurors could reserve a little sympathy too for Krystle’s
mother and father, who clung to hope for 15 hours that their daughter might be
saved in surgery, only to discover that that patient was not Krystle, who had
already died. “A parent should never have to bury a child because the hardest
thing any parent has to go through is to lose a child,” said the father. “I don’t care if it’s newborn, 6 years, 30 years or 40
years. It’s very difficult.”
The jurors might also consider 23-year-old grad student Linzi Lu, whose
life was also cut short by the Tsarnaev brothers. Her family still struggles
with the grief. “Even little things can bring it all back,” her aunt said. “It’s been very hard, very emotional.”
MIT police officer Sean Collier, 27, was ambushed and shot in cold blood
for his gun a few days later by the Tsarnaevs. “Sean was taken from us in a
moment of extreme evil,” said a friend, “but that instant has never defined how we remember him on
this campus.”
Here is a list of the severe injuries suffered by the 264
wounded in the blasts, whose lives also will never be the same. Sixteen people
lost limbs and at least 3 more lost multiple limbs. And yet Tsarnaev’s defense
team wants the jurors to take pity on the poor fugitive who helped wreak that
havoc.
Defense attorney David Bruck said the team intends to show that the
younger brother’s motive “may well have been the defendant’s domination by,
love for, adoration of, submissiveness to… his older brother.” Hopefully the jury
understands that children often adore their older siblings but stop short of setting
off bombs full of ball bearings and carpenter’s nails at crowded events in a
bid for their love and attention. Also, the younger Tsarnaev was not a child.
He was 19, and if you’re old enough to do the crime, you’re old enough to do
the time.
Assistant U.S. Attorney William Weinreb of the prosecution noted that the
defense team’s boat sideshow is a naked plea for sympathy and a suggestion that
law enforcement went after the poor boy with unnecessary force: “It’s fair to
say what the defense really wants is for the jury to see a boat riddled with
bullets,” he said.
But the prosecution would like the jurors to see the boat as well, or at
least the jihadist messages Tsarnaev scrawled inside the boat in his own blood:
“Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.” “We Muslims are one body.
You kill one of us, you hurt us all.” Not to mention the references to Allah
and martyrdom.
As the trial’s opening statements got underway today, Weinreb described Tsarnaev as “a soldier in a holy war against Americans” who was
radicalized over a two-year period and believed that the U.S. was an enemy of
Muslims. “He also believed that by winning that victory, he had taken a step
toward reaching paradise. That was his motive for committing these crimes.”
In her opening statement today, defense attorney Judy Clarke said that
her team will not “sidestep” her client’s responsibility, but they plan to
portray Tamerlan as the mastermind. She showed the jury a younger photo of Dzhokhar
and claimed that she will show how he went “from this to this.”
“The evidence will not establish and we will not argue that Tamerlan put
a gun to Dzhokhar's head or that he forced him to join in the plan,” she said,
“but you will hear evidence about the kind of influence that this older brother
had.”
Clarke has saved a number of high-profile clients from the death penalty,
including Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and
Gabrielle Giffords shooter Jared Loughner. But perhaps this time the jury will
recognize her client’s evil for what it is, and do the right thing.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Magazine, 3/5/15)
