Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Jurors deciding the fate of convicted Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will hear from more witnesses on Thursday picked by defense attorneys pressing their case the 21-year old should be spared execution because he was influenced by his radicalized older brother.
Tsarnaev was convicted last month of joining his now-deceased brother Tamerlan in bombing the race’s crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, killing 3 people and injuring 264, many of whom had limbs ripped off in the blasts.
His lawyers are now trying to convince the jury that he should be sentenced to life in prison without parole, not death, for his involvement in one of the highest-profile attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Over the past two weeks the defense team has called more than forty witnesses, many of whom described the young ethnic Chechen as a mild-mannered teenager who, even as his college grades slipped and his family fell apart, remained the kind and well-liked youngster he had been as a child.
A long-time family friend, Elmirza Khozhugov, testified on Wednesday that Tsarnaev “would always go along” with whatever the older brother, Tamerlan, suggested and that Tamerlan became deeply interested in religion, politics and conspiracy theories in the years before the attack.
Investigators found al Qaeda propaganda on computers belonging to both men, and a note written by Dzhokhar casting the bombing as retribution for U.S. military campaigns in Muslim lands. Prosecutors seeking to impose a death sentence have argued Dzhokhar was an equal partner with Tamerlan in the attack. The 26-year-old Tamerlan was killed following a gunfight with police three days after the bombing.
Martin Richard, 8, Chinese exchange student Lu Lingzi, 23, and restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29, died in the attack. The Tsarnaev brothers also shot dead Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier.