Jury selection for the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, accused in the Boston Marathon attacks, was due to begin yesterday.
Those chosen are set to decide whether Tsarnaev planned and carried out the twin bombings that killed three people and injured more than 260 near the finish line of the race on April 15, 2013.
If they find him guilty, they will also decide whether he should be put to death.
It is perhaps the most closely watched federal death penalty case since Timothy McVeigh was convicted and executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Tsarnaev’s lawyers tried in vain for months to get the trial moved, arguing the Boston jury pool was tainted because of the number of locals with connections to the race. They drew parallels to the McVeigh case, which was moved for similar reasons.
Jury selection is expected to take several weeks because of extensive media coverage. The process could also be slowed if potential jurors express objections to the death penalty.
Some legal observers say Tsarnaev’s lawyers, facing powerful evidence against him, will probably focus their energies on the penalty phase, when they could present mitigating evidence to spare his life.
Prosecutors say 21-year-old Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, ethnic Chechens who have lived in the US for about a decade — carried out the bombings as retaliation for US actions in Muslim countries. They are also accused of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died after a firefight with police several days after the bombings. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured later that day, wounded and bloodied, hiding inside a boat stored in a suburban yard.
Prosecutors said he described a motive in a note written in the boat: “The US government is killing our innocent civilians” and “We Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers may lay the groundwork for some kind of mental health explanation, said Christopher Dearborn, a professor at Suffolk University Law School.
That could include any persecution his family might have suffered as ethnic minorities in Kyrgyzstan, where the brothers spent most of their lives before moving to the US with their parents and two sisters.
“I think the real value in that may be to start to try to generate even a little bit of empathy around this and humanize the kid a little bit, hopefully enough to save a life,” Dearborn said.
Alice LoCicero, a Cambridge psychologist and terrorism expert who wrote the book Why ‘Good Kids’ Turn Into Deadly Terrorists: Deconstructing the Accused Boston Marathon Bombers and Others Like Them, said she believes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have been susceptible to the influence of his brother and others because he had lost structure in the year before the bombings.
His parents moved to the volatile Dagestan region of Russia and the family was having financial troubles. Authorities believe Tamerlan Tsarnaev became radicalized in the last few years of his life, including during a six-month trip to Dagestan and Chechnya in 2012.
However, prosecutors say Dzhokhar Tsarnaev showed signs before the bombings that he was becoming radicalized.
At least one of three college friends convicted of lying or impeding the investigation is expected to testify against him.
An additional friend who pleaded guilty to possessing a gun used to kill a police officer during the manhunt is also expected to testify for the prosecution.
Supporters of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have demonstrated outside the courthouse during pretrial hearings.
Heather Abbott, who lost part of her left leg in the bombings, is one of several victims who plan to attend at least part of the trial.
Abbott said she hopes to gain some understanding of the motive.
“I don’t see it as something that will get me past the horror of that day,” Abbott said. “It’s something that I will always live with.”
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS