Who is defending dzhokhar

Among those who want capital punishment abolished in this country, Judy Clarke is the most effective champion in history. Ted was trying to fire Clarke. Ted had been legally cornered. Defending him was never going to be easy.

The evidence was overwhelming. From the strict isolation of his small cabin in Lincoln, Montana, he had painstakingly built and mailed bombs that had killed 3 people and injured 23 others.

Once a precocious math student with advanced degrees, Kaczynski had become one of the most deliberate killers in history. He had drawn up a detailed manifesto with numbered paragraphs that he blackmailed The Washington Post and The New York Times into publishing by threatening to continue killing if they did not.

The tract was a far cry from incoherent, though it was certainly turgid and extreme, arguing that the steady march of modern technology, industry, and socialization was profoundly dehumanizing and was destroying the possibility of happiness. Here was a man who had carefully thought through his reasons for murder and then carried out his attacks with great deliberation over a period of years.

His crimes fell well within at least two of the modern criteria for capital punishment: premeditation and multiple victims.

His trial was almost certain to end in a sentence of death. He could avoid it by pleading guilty and accepting life in prison without hope of appeal, pardon, or parole, which he did not wish to do. Or he could proceed to trial and let Clarke and the other lawyers present the defense they had painstakingly prepared in the 21 months since his capture—an approach he had just realized would portray him as mentally ill.

Kaczynski would later accuse Clarke of having deceived him about this until shortly before the trial. Clarke did not respond to requests for an interview. For this murderously proud man, something more than personal humiliation was at stake.

An insanity defense would forever color his theories as madness. And, for him, his ideas were the important thing. They were why he had killed. He was prepared to die for them. David had mixed feelings about the trial. He himself had led the F. Of course, Judy as an attorney is trying to use her best influence with Ted to save his life, and here it was kind of falling apart at this critical moment.

She could have been just really frustrated. She could have [felt], My client is taking himself down despite all my planning and best efforts to save his life. Such a trial would be a charade, she said. She and her team would not take part.

Back in the courtroom, as Ted listened to Burrell deny his request, Clarke raised one hand and rested it gently on his shoulder. She knew, as David did, what a blow this was to him. Within hours he would attempt to hang himself in his cell. He is still complaining about it—that was the point of his letter to me. To touch him. Clarke, pictured with another lead defense attorney Quinn Denver, exiting the courthouse in the Ted Kaczynski trial in Compassion, the thing David Kaczynski saw in her, cannot by itself explain Judy Clarke.

In that interview with the law-school magazine, Clarke spoke of teaching students to act in the best interests of their client—and of their cause. If Clarke is compassionate and kind, she is also defiant and committed.

This is no marshmallow. Which may not be immediately apparent to look at her. She is surprisingly tall and lean, a lifelong runner. She wears her straight brown hair short and flat. She eschews makeup and for court has always dressed in a perfectly sensible female version of standard lawyerly attire, a conventionally cut wool suit, knee-length skirt and jacket, over a cotton shirt buttoned at the collar and a big, floppy, silk bow tie, which became her signature if, for many years, only because most women had stopped wearing them 20 years ago.

Friends recently tried to talk her out of the bow ties, but she said she could not be bothered. Knowing exactly what to put on each morning saved her from having to think about it, she explained, but in Boston, during the early stages of the Tsarnaev trial, the bow tie was gone, replaced by a black turtleneck or simply an open collar. Her manner, like her choice of clothing, is deliberately understated. In photos she often looks pensive, even severe, eyes averted, mouth pursed, but her friends say she is the opposite in private: animated, with a warm sense of humor, someone who enjoys lifting a beer and telling a story, someone who laughs often.

In court she is more earnest than clever. She impresses more with impeccable preparation and sincerity than with oratory. With judges and juries and before a classroom, her tone is conversational, genuine, and direct.

Kendall said these issues with the jurors are tied to the decision to not move the case. On Sept. Todashev was killed in a confrontation with police shortly after the alleged confession.

If they had, they believed it would have shown the radicalization and violence of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and the influence he may have had over his little brother. Had the jury known more, they may have considered the brothers' relationship a mitigating factor and sentenced Tsarnaev to life in prison, instead of death.

They detailed what they say was his quiet radicalization while he was a student at UMass Dartmouth. And, in a particularly powerful section, prosecutors reminded the court of the devastating injuries Tsarnaev and his brother inflicted on marathon spectators with their homemade bombs. Tsarnaev got a fair trial in Boston, the government said. Yes, much of the jury pool knew about the bombing, but those seated said they could set aside what they knew and be impartial. In Alabama or Oklahoma, where there is broad support for capital punishment, it is easy to death-qualify a panel of jurors.

But in Boston a jury that is death-qualified is also demographically anomalous: according to polls taken during the trial, sixty per cent of Americans favored executing Tsarnaev, but only fifteen per cent of Bostonians did.

During jury selection, a middle-aged restaurant manager was asked if she could deliver a death sentence. They did it. By their actions. Not coming to work, stealing, whatever. On a May morning, as gulls hung on the breeze in Boston Harbor, Clarke addressed the jury a final time. At one point, Clarke nearly conceded the logic of capital punishment. As her closing neared its crescendo, her normally casual demeanor assumed a frantic urgency, and she gesticulated—pounding her fist, slicing the air—as if she were conducting an orchestra.

Then William Weinreb approached the lectern for a rebuttal. The sentiment he expressed to her was not so different from what he wrote in the boat: it was a pity when innocent people died, even if it was necessary. Miriam Conrad and David Bruck both fumed and raised objections. Clarke just stared at Weinreb, her chin propped on her left fist, her thumb digging deeper and deeper into her cheek. All of us, Weinreb said, should be judged on the basis of our actions.

Before the murderer Gary Gilmore was executed at Utah State Prison in , bullets were distributed to the five-member firing squad; one of them was a blank. This dispersal of moral responsibility is a curious feature of our system of capital punishment: the message is that the state is doing the killing, and therefore no individual is culpable for the death.

One common rationale for capital punishment is that it will deter others from committing awful crimes. But there is no evidence that this is the case. Arthur Koestler once pointed out that when thieves were hanged in the village square other thieves flocked to the execution to pick the pockets of the spectators. A second justification is that the most violent criminals, even if they are jailed for life, could still endanger others.

The government labored to suggest that Tsarnaev might someday be transferred out of seclusion and into the general population at ADX. One defense witness, a former prison warden, observed that, in such an unlikely event, his greatest safety concern would be for Tsarnaev.

The remaining ground for capital punishment is retribution. If murder is in the nature of man, the law is not intended to imitate or reproduce that nature. It is intended to correct it. Clarke reminded the jury that, however they completed their forms, each of them was making a moral judgment. She could not let them think of the jury form the way the restaurant manager thought about errant employees, or the way the firing squad thought about that blank.

As Clarke spoke, she looked straight at the forewoman, who glared back at her, arms folded across her chest. After fourteen hours of deliberation, the jury returned with a death sentence. According to the jury forms, all but three of the jurors believed that, even without the influence of Tamerlan, Jahar would have carried out the attacks on his own.

Only two believed that the defendant was remorseful. But in this instance Clarke had failed to paint a picture of her young client that was moving enough to save him. It may be that she never found the key. Unbeknownst to that juror, and to the public in Boston, Tsarnaev had already expressed remorse for his actions. Tsarnaev offered to resolve this case without a trial. But it was never shared with the jury, because the government, under the terms of the Special Administrative Measures, had it sealed.

I spoke recently with Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who now teaches at Harvard.

Why go through with it all? A spokesperson for the prosecutors declined to comment on why the letter was suppressed. Supporters of the detention facility have long argued that American federal courts are not equipped to try terrorists. But here was a case in which a civilian federal court could deliver not just a guilty verdict but the death penalty. Numerous people have been convicted of terrorism in civilian courts since September 11th, but Tsarnaev is the first to receive a death sentence.

Gertner said that the trial should not have been held in Massachusetts. If relocating was not appropriate in this case, she observed, when would it be? A second juror, a twenty-three-year-old named Kevan Fagan, recently spoke to the press. Tsarnaev is prepared to address the court. He spoke in a thick accent that sounded vaguely Middle Eastern. Before the bombing, he had sounded more conventionally American. Turning to Clarke and her colleagues, Tsarnaev said that he wanted to thank his attorneys.

Tsarnaev did not look at the many victims who had gathered in the courtroom. He stared straight ahead, his hands clasped around his belt buckle. Clarke sat motionless, watching him. Tsarnaev spoke in precisely the language of religious devotion that the prosecutors might have predicted. But people often change considerably between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. He had spent those two years in solitary confinement, with plenty of time to ponder his actions—and to read the Koran.

Throughout the trial, Tsarnaev had been a cipher, and observers wanted him to demonstrate that he understood the gravity of his misdeeds. The Koran, like other holy books, can be read to condemn such acts of violence or to condone them.

On a given night, Tsarnaev might fall asleep believing that he would be rewarded in the afterlife, and the next night believing that he would be punished. Tsarnaev will not be executed anytime soon. Since , seventy-five defendants have been given the federal death penalty, but only three have been put to death.

Appeals drag out for decades. Until a California judge ruled capital punishment unconstitutional last year, death-row prisoners there were seven times more likely to die of natural causes than of execution. In death-penalty work, Elisabeth Semel told me, you talk not about losing a case but about losing a client. You need to quit one trial early. Last month, Clarke and her colleagues filed a motion for a retrial, maintaining, once again, that the case should not have been tried in Boston.

Bruck recently agreed to represent Dylann Roof, who is accused of murdering nine people in June at a black church in Charleston; Clarke could yet join him in that defense. Tsarnaev concluded his courtroom remarks with a few final encomiums to Allah. Clarke reached out and placed her hand on his back. A surprising and dangerous defense strategy under consideration by O.

By Jeffrey Toobin. By Hannah Arendt. Enter your e-mail address. Annals of Law. A Reporter at Large. All day the defense did not cross examine witness after witness from the prosecution while they recounted the horror of that April 15, day when three were killed -- including an eight-year-old boy -- and injured after dual explosions ripped through the crowds near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The defense's move surprised many federal officials who said today they are asking why a court should spend potentially months proving what the defense has already admitted.

Legal experts told ABC News that while the defense's strategy may appear odd from the outside, that's only because they're not focusing on winning this phase of the trial, but avoiding the death penalty later. They certainly don't want to go and cross examine victims very hard.

By developing a rapport with the jury, when their turn comes to talk about the death penalty phase of it, they will have a rapport with the same jurors that are hearing all this evidence. First, Olgetree said the defense likely lobbied for a deal in which Tsarnaev pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, but the government didn't go for it -- potentially under pressure from the Obama administration, after Attorney General Eric Holder authorized the government to seek the death penalty last January.