|
 Tsarnaev, a 21-year-old ethnic Chechen was convicted last month of
killing three people and injuring 264 others by detonating a pair of
homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the race's crowded finish line on
April 15, 2013.
Three days later, he and his 26-year-old brother shot a police
officer to death, setting off 24 hours of chaos in which the pair
carjacked a Chinese businessman and hurled bombs at police,
triggering a daylong lockdown of most of the Boston area while
police searched for Tsarnaev.
Federal prosecutors contend that Tsarnaev, who moved with his family
to Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Russia a decade before the attack,
was an adherent of al Qaeda's militant Islamist ideology who wanted
to "punish America" with the attack.
 Defense attorneys, meanwhile, portrayed him as a hapless teenager
who was in the thrall of his older brother, Tamerlan, who they
contend dreamed up the attack after being spurned by a militant
group he had attempted to join on a 2012 trip to Russia.
Tamerlan died in the early morning hours of April 19, 2013, after a
gunfight between the brothers and police in suburban Watertown,
Massachusetts, that ended when Dzhokhar ran Tamerlan over with a
stolen car.
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During the trial the jury saw gruesome, sometimes graphic, videos of
the explosions and their bloody aftermath and heard from some of the
18 people who lost limbs in the bombing, as well as friends and
family of the four people killed by the Tsarnaevs.
Eight-year-old Martin Richard, 23-year-old Chinese exchange student
Lingzi Lu and 29-year-old restaurant managed Krystle Campbell died
in the bombing. Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer
Sean Collier was shot dead by the Tsarnaevs three days later
(Reporting by Scott Malone)
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