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Boston Defense Focuses On Tsarnaev’s Troubled Family

Boston Defense Focuses On Tsarnaev’s Troubled Family

By Richard A. Serrano, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

BOSTON — Close to wrapping up their case, defense lawyers for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev portrayed their client Tuesday as the product of a troubled and ailing Chechen father who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and an angry, aggressive older brother who often picked fights in Boston.

Tsarnaev was found guilty last month on all 30 charges in the April 2013 bombings, and the jury of seven women and five men will soon be deciding whether the 21-year-Russian immigrant is moved to death row or spends the rest of his life in prison with no parole.

Defense lawyers, hoping for the life sentence, on Tuesday sought to show how he was affected by family members, from their history in the Chechen region to their immigration to Boston when Tsarnaev was eight.

There has been much testimony in the trial about his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, who became a strict Muslim at the time that her oldest son, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was becoming an Islamic radical.

Testimony Tuesday was the first that centered on his father, Anzor Tsarnaev.

Dr. Alexander Niss, a former Boston psychiatrist who now practices in Los Angeles, testified that for two years he treated the father for PTSD, nightmares, anxiety, hallucinations, and near dementia. Niss said the father, a former boxer, was deeply affected by the Chechen wars in the 1990s.

“He had a lot of anxiety, and panic attacks,” Niss said. “He had flashbacks. He had a lot of paranoia. He was afraid of the Russian KGB, thought they were following him and looking through his window at his home.”

The father, who is living in Russia, was not called to testify.

Amanda Ransom, a college friend of Tamerlan’s wife, described Tamerlan’s cruel behavior, saying he dressed flashy, drove a Mercedes and was prone to starting fights. She recalled him once angrily punching a man for speaking to his wife Katherine and said she sometimes could hear him screaming and throwing things at her as well.

One night in their school dorm, she said, “I heard him laughing and she was crying in her room. After they had had sex he told her he had AIDS and when she started to cry, he laughed at her. He said he wasn’t serious, it was a joke.”

Henry Alvarez, a fellow high school wrestler with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, said he had been shocked to learn that his former teammate was arrested in the bombings. “I never could imagine he would do something like this,” Alvarez said.

The defense is expected to put on expert testimony about the harsh conditions at the federal Supermax prison, where Tsarnaev presumably would go if he is sentenced to life, and then end its case Wednesday or Thursday.

Photo: Boston Marathon Bombing via Facebook

U.S. To Seek Death Penalty For Accused Boston Bomber

U.S. To Seek Death Penalty For Accused Boston Bomber

Washington (AFP) – The United States is to seek a rare federal death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving young student accused of the Boston marathon bombings, Attorney General Eric Holder said.

Three people were killed and about 260 wounded on April 15 last year when two bombs made of explosives-packed pressure cookers went off near the finish line of the Boston marathon. Several of the injured lost limbs.

Tsarnaev, then 19, and his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev were cornered by police after a four-day manhunt. Tamerlan died after an exchange of fire with police and Dzhokhar was wounded.

“The nature of the conduct at issue and the resultant harm compel this decision,” Holder said in a statement on the prosecution of the 20-year-old, a U.S. citizen from a Chechen Muslim family.

Experts say the announcement — which was widely anticipated — is partly a symbolic gesture to the American public, for whom the bombings reignited traumatic memories of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and does not necessarily mean Tsarnaev will be executed if found guilty.

The shaggy-haired onetime student has pleaded not guilty to 30 federal charges related to the bombings, including 17 serious charges that can carry sentences of death or life in prison.

These charges include using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death, as well as conspiracy and bombing of a place of public use resulting in death, and carjacking.

Tsarnaev is also charged in connection with the fatal shooting of a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the brothers’ wild overnight getaway attempt.

The brothers are said to have built the bombs with help from an online Al-Qaeda magazine, but they are not accused of having received help from any organized foreign terror group.

Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor in Massachusetts, home to Boston, said in a statement: “We support this decision and the trial team is prepared to move forward with the prosecution.”

She added: “The case will now continue to proceed through the pre-trial process and the next scheduled court event is a status conference set for February 12, 2014.”

The full trial, which will garner worldwide media interest, is likely to begin in the autumn and is expected to take about five months of what is sure to be harrowing testimony from runners and spectators, some of whom suffered life-changing injuries.

Massachusetts abolished the death penalty in 1982, but Tsarnaev is accused under federal law.

Of nearly 500 death sentences sought at federal level, only 70 were handed down and there have been only three actual executions since the reinstatement of the federal death penalty in 1988.

If Tsarnaev is executed, he will be the first defendant to be put to death at federal level since Timothy McVeigh, who went to the death chamber in June 2001 for the Oklahoma City bombing.

Richard Dieter, director of the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, told AFP: “It’s just an option on the table. There are many more steps to go in this process.”

Judy Clarke, a renowned lawyer and specialist on the death penalty who has saved several high-profile convicts from the gallows, is representing Tsarnaev.

She will fight hard, Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard, said recently.

Their client “wants to live and he wants to avoid execution, they are not going to say, ‘I want to die, I want to join my brother'”.

Clarke has successfully saved several notorious convicts from the death penalty, including Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of complicity in the September 11 attacks on the United States, the famous “Unabomber ” Ted Kaczynski, and Eric Rudolph, responsible for the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing in 1996.

AFP Photo/Spencer Platt