Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ended his long silence on Wednesday, apologizing for the pain and suffering he caused his victims, many of whom packed a federal courtroom as a judge formally imposed his death sentence.
“If there is any lingering doubt … I did it, along with my brother,” Tsarnaev said, referring to the bombings carried out by him and older brother Tamerlan. “I ask Allah to have mercy on me, my brother and my family.”
Tsarnaev, 21, bowed his head and clasped his hands in front of him as he stood at the defense table. Speaking in a low, slightly accented voice, he expressed remorse but never turned to face his victims. He said he had come to know their names, faces and ages during his trial, but he did not address any of them by name.
“Now, I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering that I’ve caused you, for the damage that I’ve done. Irreparable damage,” he said.
“Allah said in the Quran that no soul is burdened with more than it can bear, and you told us just how unbearable it was, how horrendous it was, this thing I put you through.” he said. “I also wish that far more people had a chance to get up there, but I took them from you.”
He added that he prayed for Allah “to bestow his mercy upon the deceased, those affected in the bombing and their families. I pray for your relief, for your healing, for your well-being, for your strength.”
Judge George O’Toole told Tsarnaev he embraced a cruel God, heeded the jihadist “siren song” and embraced “monstrous self-deception” to carry out the bombings. The judge quoted works by Shakespeare and Verdi as he formally imposed the death sentence — a decision already made by a federal jury.
“Whenever your name is mentioned, what will be remembered is the evil you have done, ” O’Toole said. “No one will remember that your teachers were fond of you. No one will mention that your friends found you funny and fun to be with. No one will say you were a talented athlete or that you displayed compassion in being a Best Buddy or that you showed more respect to your women friends than your male peers did.
“What will be remembered is that you murdered and maimed innocent people and that you did it willfully and intentionally. You did it on purpose.
O’Toole recalled Verdi’s opera “Otello” and the evil character Iago, who tries to justify his malice by saying he believes in a cruel God.
“Surely someone who believes that God smiles on and rewards the deliberate killing and maiming of innocents believes in a cruel God,” the judge said. “That is not, it cannot be, the God of Islam. Anyone who has been led to believe otherwise has been maliciously and willfully deceived.”
It was the day of final reckoning for Tsarnaev, one also set aside for emotional impact statements from victims.
After the sentencing, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said she was more struck by what Tsanaev didn’t say, particularly his failure to denounce terrorism and Islamic extremism.
Survivor Lynn Julian told reporters outside court that Tsarnaev’s “Oscar-worthy” speech lacked sincerity.
“I regret ever wanting to hear him speak,” she said.
Prosecutors say the Tsarnaev brothers set off their homemade bombs — containing fireworks, BBs, nails and metal shards packed inside pressure cookers — to become martyrs to the cause of jihad. They also sought to punish Americans for the deaths of Muslims overseas.
Until Wednesday, Tsarnaev’s only public words of explanation existed in a rambling “manifesto” scrawled with a pencil on the sides of a boat while he hid for 18 hours before surrendering to police. The message was punctuated by bullet holes and streaked with blood.
At the defense table during the trial, Tsarnaev fiddled with his bushy beard and tangle of curls, betraying no emotion as survivors and families of the dead told their heartrending stories. His face was blank as horrific images of the devastation he caused filled the screens inside the courtroom.
The only flicker of emotion came when he appeared to wipe a tear from his eye while an elderly aunt, brought from Russia by the defense, dissolved into tears and gasping sobs on the witness stand.
Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun who has earned renown for her work with death-row inmates, testified for the defense that Tsarnaev seemed “genuinely sorry.” She said he told her during one of several visits that the bombing victims didn’t deserve to suffer.
“He said it emphatically,” she told jurors, quoting Tsarnaev as saying, “Nobody deserves to suffer like they did.”
Defense attorney Judy Clarke chose her words carefully when she spoke during the trial about whether Tsarnaev felt remorse. She stopped short of telling jurors in her closing argument that he was sorry. All she’d say was he’d shown signs of “maturity” and was on the road to someday being remorseful.
In the end, only two of the 12 jurors found any glimmer of remorse.
Tsarnaev was convicted of 30 counts, and the jury determined that six specific crimes merited the death penalty. They involved the deaths of Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old graduate student from China, and Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy. The two were killed by the bomb Tsarnaev set off in front of the Forum, a restaurant near the marathon finish line on Boylston Street. It literally tore them apart.
The jury did not find that he should be punished by the death penalty for the death of Campbell, who was killed by the bomb set off by his brother near Marathon Sports. And they did not condemn him to die for the shooting of Collier, the MIT police officer, a few days later. Those crimes will be punished by the only other alternative: life in prison without parole.
The U.S. Marshal’s Service will maintain custody of Tsarnaev until his appeals are exhausted, the judge ordered Wednesday.
Tsarnaev has been held under the tight restrictions usually reserved for terrorists; they include solitary confinement and no contact with other inmates or the outside world. Most prisoners subject to those restrictions serve their time at the so-called Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. But the federal government’s death row is at the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and the judge ordered him executed under the prevailing laws of Indiana.
Tsarnaev’s case is likely to result in years of appeals, and no one can say with any certainty when he might be executed, if ever.
Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said he expects Tsarnaev’s appeals to last a decade or more.
“One can’t predict the likelihood that any given death sentence will be carried out,” Dunham said. “Statistically, in both federal and state death penalty cases, it is more likely that a sentence will be overturned than that it will be carried out.”
He added it was difficult to predict the success of any appeal because of the secretive way in which the case was argued.
“Many of the pretrial proceedings took place under seal, and some of the sidebars were under seal,” Dunham said. “We will not know until those transcripts are unsealed what other issues may be present in the case.”
Just 75 people have received federal death sentences since modern death penalty laws went into force in 1988, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s website. – CNN.
