Closing arguments in the Boston Marathon Bombing trial will be heard Monday in US District Court. The defense rested it’s case Tuesday hoping to have planted doubt in jurors’ minds that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was fully complicit. He is charged with 30 counts and if found guilty he could be sentenced to death based on 17 of them.
His attorneys have already said “It was him,” but it was Tamerlan they argue that masterminded the plot. This is the key and only defense argument because it is intended to downplay—not dismiss— the most serious of charges against Tsarnaev: Conspiracy to bomb a place of public use resulting in death and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death. Both required planning and premeditation of an act that resulted in the deaths of three people and the maiming of 260 other bystanders. Tsarnaev is further charged with possession and use of a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence resulting in death; the killing of MIT officer Sean Collier.
And then there are non-death penalty charges for which Tsarnaev's attorneys concede he bore responsibility for, but they are trying to prove that these crimes were committed with Dzhokhar playing a secondary role. The most serious of these is car-jacking resulting in serious bodily injury. The circumstances were described in terrifying detail by car-jacking victim Dung Mengon the witness stand over several days.
Importantly, the government also pointed out that it was during a chase and later a shootout in Watertown that Mass Transit officer Richard Donahue was shot by a stray bullet. An eyewitness interviewed by WGBH said it was accidently fired by other officers:
“About right here, before he went through the intersection. That's when they shot the other cop in the leg.” What do you mean I asked when you say, "they shot the other cop. "The cops shot the cop," he said.
But the government says the injuries sustained by Donahue occurred as he was responding to the car jacking and shootout and, therefore, Tsarnaev was responsible. During the trail, jurors were told that Donahue almost died. He was pulled into the driveway of Jeffrey Ryan, whom I interviewed a year ago.
Ryan said. "So I came out, and I saw these three policemen, doing emergency response on this fellow, and they were frantic. First of all, he'd been shot in the femoral artery, and blood was like a geyser, it was just shooting everywhere. They said, 'Towels, towels, towels! Get us towels for tourniquets.' And so I shouted to my wife, who sent a bucket of towels down the stairway, and I brought them out and they used that to stanch the bleeding."
Tsarnaev’s defense team has attempted to raise friendly fire as the circumstance leading to Donahue’s shooting over the objections of US prosecutors, and those objections were sustained.
On Monday in its closing arguments the government will take the jury back to the Boston Marathon finish line and the sights and sounds of anguish that April 15, 2013. And the defense will argue, as they have throughout this trial, that yes, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did it, but that the mitigating circumstance was he only did it because he was guided by a domineering and heavily influential brother.
