Boston Marathon Bombing Trial

The trial for accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has opened in Massachusetts after defense attorneys failed in their repeated bids to move it out of state. [...] On the trial’s first day, defense attorneys acknowledged their client’s role in the bombings, but said he was heavily influenced by his older brother.

  Democracy Now!

That’s a great defense. Almost as good as the one I heard about from an attorney in a law firm where I worked in San Francisco who reported on returning from trial one day that the defendant’s lawyer opened with, “Your honor, my client is very sorry.”

At any rate, earlier this week, the judge ruled that the defense cannot argue mitigating circumstances, so, “Your honor, his brother is the bad guy here,” won’t be allowed until, perhaps, sentencing arguments.

The trial comes as the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Florida has announced it will sue the FBI for $30 million on behalf of the family of an unarmed Chechen man killed during questioning over his ties to the Tsarnaev brothers. The FBI says an agent shot Ibragim Todashev in self-defense after Todashev attacked him, but his parents have accused the FBI of killing their son "in cold blood."

Good luck with that.

By the way, there is no death penalty in Massachusetts, but it’s a federal case, and the feds are asking for death. They can do whatever they want, I guess. Sentencing should be interesting.

”And even the people of Boston who were victimized by this horrific attack, the majority of whom think that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty, oppose death for the defendant. It’s almost 60 percent of people polled say that they oppose the death penalty now. It appears as if, if the prosecution, if the DOJ at any point made an offer of life without parole without the possibility of appeal, that the defense team, headed by Judy Clarke, who’s an expert at getting people off of death row, would accept that plea. It’s not clear to us why the DOJ is going ahead with this death penalty prosecution, particularly given that the city is being retraumatized by this kind of testimony that we’ve heard this week.” [Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty project at the ACLU of Massachusetts]

Not clear? How long have you been living in the United States?

[On 9/11, 2011,] "three people, one of whom was reportedly Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s best, closest friend, a man named Brendan Mess—three young men had their heads nearly decapitated in separate rooms of a house [in a Boston suburb]. [...]Those murders are still unsolved. [...] About a week after the [marathon] bombings, ABC News published a report by Michele McPhee, a Boston-based reporter, containing anonymous law enforcement sources’ allegations that in fact Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the then newly deceased accused Boston bomber, was responsible for those murders."

That’s one way to take murders off the books.  A dead guy did it.  Another case closed.

After the marathon bombing, the FBI went down to Florida to “interview” a friend of Tamerlan, Ibragim Todashev, about the 2011 murders.

” —the FBI killed him, basically.”

Basically. Yeah. Basically.

"The strange thing is that in the wake of those murders, even after saying that the FBI had forensic evidence linking Tamerlan to the crime scene in Waltham, in court last year the DOJ told the public defenders, in fact, we have no evidence linking Tamerlan to those crimes."

That is strange. But, I have faith. They’ll find some.