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| It this courtroom sketch, U.S. Attorney William Weinreb, left, is depicted delivering opening statements in front of U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr., right rear, on the first day of the federal death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Wednesday, March 4, 2015, in Boston. Tsarnaev, depicted seated second from right between defense attorneys Judy Clarke, third from right, and Miriam Conrad, right, is charged with conspiring with his brother to place two bombs near the marathon finish line in April 2013, killing three and injuring 260 people. |
BOSTON (AP)
-- The question, for all practical purposes, is no longer whether
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev took part in the Boston Marathon bombing. It's whether
he deserves to die for it.
In a blunt opening
statement at the nation's biggest terrorism trial in nearly 20 years,
Tsarnaev's own lawyer flatly told a jury that the 21-year-old former
college student committed the crime.
"It WAS him," said defense attorney Judy Clarke, one of the nation's foremost death-penalty specialists.
But
in a strategy aimed at saving Tsarnaev from a death sentence, she
argued that he had fallen under the malevolent influence of his now-dead
older brother, Tamerlan.
"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," Clarke said,
"but you will hear evidence about the kind of influence that this older
brother had."
Three people were killed and
more than 260 hurt when two shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs
exploded near the finish line on April 15, 2013. Tsarnaev, then 19, was
accused of carrying out the attacks with 26-year-old Tamerlan, who was
killed in a shootout and getaway attempt days later.
Authorities
contend the brothers - ethnic Chechens who arrived from Russia more
than a decade ago - were driven by anger over U.S. wars in Muslim lands.
Federal
prosecutors used their opening statements, along with heartbreaking
testimony and grisly video, to sketch a picture of torn-off limbs,
ghastly screams, pools of blood, and the smell of sulfur and burned hair
in the streets of Boston. They painted Tsarnaev as a cold-blooded
killer.
Tsarnaev planted a bomb designed to
"tear people apart and create a bloody spectacle," then hung out with
his college buddies as if he didn't have a care in the world, prosecutor
William Weinreb said.
"He believed that he
was a soldier in a holy war against Americans," Weinreb said. "He also
believed that by winning that victory, he had taken a step toward
reaching paradise."
Among the first witnesses
for the prosecution were two women who lost legs in the attack,
including Rebekah Gregory, who walked slowly to the stand on an
artificial limb.
"I remember being thrown
back, hoisted into the air," said Gregory, who had gone to watch the
race with her 5-year-old son, Noah. "My first instinct as a mother was,
where in the world was my baby, where was my son?"
She
said she looked down at her leg: "My bones were literally laying next
to me on the sidewalk and blood was everywhere." She saw other peoples'
body parts all around her, and "at that point, I thought that was the
day I would die."
"I could hear Noah, I don't
know how, but I could hear my little boy. She said he was saying,
`Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,' over and over again."
"I said a prayer. I said, `God, if this is it, take me, but let me know that Noah is OK.'"
She
said someone finally picked up her son and put him down beside her.
Breaking down in tears, she testified that as she looked for the boy,
she saw a woman dead on the pavement.
Karen
Rand McWatters, whose left leg had to be amputated, described how she
watched her close friend Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant
manager, die on the pavement next to her.
"She
very slowly said that her legs hurt, and we held hands, and shortly
after that, her hand went limp in mine and she never spoke again after
that," she said, choking back tears.
A
shaggy-haired, goateed Tsarnaev slouched in his seat and showed little
reaction as the case unfolded. The defense did not ask a single question
of the four victims who testified Wednesday.
About
two dozen victims who came to watch the case took up an entire side of
the courtroom, listening somberly to details of the carnage. Several
hung their heads and appeared to fight back tears.
Prosecutors
also showed the jury a gruesome video of people lying in pools of
blood. The footage was punctuated by screams, moans and the crying of a
boy. The ground was strewn with ball bearings and chunks of metal, and
smoke wafted over the victims.
The 10 women
and eight men on the jury watched somberly. Several grimaced, especially
at the sight of a gaping hole in a woman's leg.
In
his opening statement, the prosecutor also described how 8-year-old
Martin Richard stood on a metal barrier with other children so he could
get a good view of the runners.
"The bomb tore
large chunks of flesh out of Martin Richard," and he bled to death on
the sidewalk as his mother looked on helplessly, Weinreb told the jury,
with the boy's parents in the courtroom.
Because
of a wealth of evidence against Tsarnaev - including a video of him
leaving a backpack at the scene, and incriminating graffiti scrawled on
the boat where he was captured - legal experts have said there is little
chance of escaping conviction during the guilt-or-innocence phase of
the trial.
Instead, they said, Tsarnaev's
lawyers will concentrate on saving his life by arguing that Tamerlan was
the driving force in the plot.
Clarke called
the bombings "senseless, horribly misguided acts." But she asked the
jurors to "hold your hearts and minds open" until the penalty phase,
when the panel will decide whether Tsarnaev should be executed or get
life in prison.
She held up two enlarged
photos - one showing the two brothers years before the bombings, the
other showing them carrying the backpacks containing the explosives -
and asked the jury to contemplate: "What took Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from
this ... to this?"
While the outcome of the guilt-or-innocence phase is now a foregone conclusion, it is not necessarily an empty exercise.
Robert
Bloom, a Boston College law professor and former prosecutor, said the
defense will use this phase to build the case that Tsarnaev was a
follower, not a mastermind.
"They'll want to
use every opportunity they can to show he was influenced by his
brother," Bloom said. "Who bought the pressure cookers? Who bought the
BBs? All of that."
Prosecutors, for their
part, will use this portion of the trial to get across the horror of the
attack and prime the jury to come back with a death sentence in the
next stage, Bloom said.
Right up until the
moment the jury filed into the courtroom, Tsarnaev's lawyers fought to
have the trial moved out of Massachusetts, arguing that the emotional
impact of the bombings ran too deep and too many people had personal
connections to the case. But U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. and a
federal appeals court rejected the requests.
It is the most closely watched terrorism trial in the U.S. since the Oklahoma City bombing case in the mid-1990s.
Clarke
has saved a string of high-profile clients from the death penalty,
including Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph; Unabomber Ted Kaczynski;
and Jared Loughner, who shot and killed six people and gravely wounded
then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in a 2011.
