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 Tsarnaev, 21, was found guilty last month of bombing the race’s
crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, in one of the highest-profile
attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001. He was also convicted of
killing a police officer three days later.
Defense lawyers aim to persuade the same jury that found him guilty
to sentence Tsarnaev to life in prison without chance of release
rather than death, asserting that he would not have bombed the
marathon had it not been for his radical older brother, a dominant
force in his life.
The brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan, was killed following a gunfight
with police hours after the pair killed the officer.
Over the past two weeks lawyers for Tsarnaev have called three dozen
witnesses who described him as a mild-mannered teenager who, even as
his college grades slipped, remained the kind and well-liked
youngster he had been as a child.
 "He never caused harm to anybody or disrespected anybody,"college
student Henry Alvarez, who wrestled on the same team as Tsarnaev in
high school, told jurors on Tuesday.
Martin Richard, 8, Chinese exchange student Lu Lingzi, 23, and
restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, died in the bombing. The
Tsarnaev brothers also shot dead Massachusetts Institute of
Technology police officer Sean Collier.
Prior witnesses have testified that the defendant's family, ethnic
Chechens who immigrated to the United States from Russia, was
increasingly unstable in the years before the bombing.
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Friends and relatives of the Tsarnaev family told jurors that the
defendant was raised by a mentally ill father, a distracted mother
who became deeply religious in the years before the bombing and a
cruel brother who became obsessed with radical Islam.
Amanda Ransom, 25, recalled on the witness stand Tuesday that she
had seen Tamerlan Tsarnaev emotionally abuse his future wife, her
college friend Katherine Russell, including tricking her into
believing she might have contracted AIDS from him.
"At one point I heard him laughing really hard, and she was crying,"
Ransom testified, referring to the incident. Tamerlan did not have
AIDS, she said.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Barber; Editing by Scott Malone and Dan
Grebler)
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