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 Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 21, is charged with killing three people and
injuring 264 in the April 15, 2013, attack as well as shooting dead
a university police officer as he and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26,
prepared to flee the city three days later.
Tamerlan died that night following a gunbattle with police but
defense attorneys described him as the driving force behind the
largest mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001. They
said the jury must understand his role to make a fair decision on
whether to sentence Dzhokhar to death or life in prison if he is
convicted in a trial due to begin on Wednesday and last into June.
"The lead conspirator, the person who started all this and without
whom the Boston Marathon bombing would never have occurred, the
older brother, is dead ... That presents a problem for the
government's request for the death penalty," defense attorney David
Bruck told U.S. District Judge George O'Toole.
"The government says the motive is extremist, jihadist ideology,"
Bruck said as Tsarnaev sat quietly in court, dressed in a sport
jacket and open-collared shirt. "That opens the door for us to
respond that a large part of the motive may have been the
defendant’s love for, admiration of, submissiveness to, his older
brother."
In a federal death penalty case, a jury must first determine whether
the defendant is guilty and then consider his sentence. Prosecutors
argued that Tsarnaev's lawyers should not focus on the older brother
until the trial's second phase.
"They want to advance the theory of the co-conspirator's culpability
in the liability phase," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Aloke
Chakravarty. "It's simply not relevant."
'GRUESOME AND GRAPHIC'
The two sides also argued about how much graphic evidence the jury
will be shown during the trial, which will recount how bombs tore
through a crowd of thousands of people at the race's crowded finish
line, killing restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29; graduate
student Lingzi Lu, 23, and Martin Richard, 8. Massachusetts
Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 27, was fatally
shot three days later.
Defense attorneys asked that the jury not see full-body forensic
photos of the victims, saying they would cause victims' families and
jurors severe emotional distress.
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"Full body is requested because they are injured everywhere on their
bodies," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Nadine Pellegrini. "They are
gruesome and graphic because they show the deaths of three young
people by what we contend was a bomb."
The sides also argued about whether and how jurors might view the
boat where Tsarnaev was found hiding at the end of a manhunt four
days after the attack. Court documents say he left a note suggesting
the attack was in retaliation for U.S. military campaigns in
Muslim-dominated nations.
O'Toole did not immediately rule on the arguments.
Defense lawyers late Monday filed a fourth motion asking to move the
trial out of Boston, saying that more than half of the remaining
candidates from which the jury is set to be picked on Tuesday had a
connection to the case or had already determined Tsarnaev to be
guilty, based on their responses to questionnaires.
O'Toole three times rejected a similar request and an appellate
panel on Friday also rejected it.
In a related case, the Council on American-Islamic relations said on
Monday the parents of Ibragim Todashev, a friend of Tamerlan's shot
and killed by an FBI agent during the investigation of the attack,
plan to sue the federal law enforcement agency for $30 million.
(Editing by Bill Trott, Susan Heavey and Eric Walsh)
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