In a non-death penalty state like Massachusetts a federal case in which execution is an option can still be heard so long as the jury is ‘death-qualified’ – i.e. The defence team’s sole objective was a life sentence for their client, an unlikely outcome from the outset, given that the court denied motions to change the trial venue from Boston itself to a town where jurors’ friends or families were less likely to have been affected by the bombing.

One witness testified that Dzhokhar had been ‘like a puppy following his brother’, a characterisation eerily illustrated by surveillance videos of Dzhokhar trailing Tamerlan by several metres on the pavement lining the marathon route. At Tsarnaev’s trial, notwithstanding his ‘not guilty’ plea on thirty separate capital charges, his chief defence attorney told the court: ‘It was him.’ This effectively confined the defence case to the assertion that Dzhokhar had acted under the powerful influence of Tamerlan, and would not have carried out the bombing on his own, counting on character witnesses in the trial’s penalty phase to dramatise this idea to the jury. (His older brother, Tamerlan, died following a street battle with police in Watertown, Massachusetts several nights after the bombing.) The brothers had placed, and detonated by remote control, two explosive devices fashioned from pressure cookers stuffed with shrapnel three people were killed in the blasts, and more than 260 others suffered serious, permanent injuries, including 16 who lost limbs.įootage from multiple surveillance cameras overlooking the Boston Marathon dispelled any reasonable doubt that the Tsarnaev brothers had planted the bombs and set them off. , Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of two Chechen-American brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013, was sentenced to death in a Boston federal court.

The Brothers by Masha Gessen