April 08, 2015
The jury hearing the Boston Marathon bombing on Wednesday found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of killing three people and injuring 264 in the April 15, 2013 attack on the city's best-attended sporting event, as well as fatally shooting a police officer four days later.
Tsarnaev, 21, was tried on a sprawling 30-count indictment, with 17 of the charges carrying the death penalty. The jury that found him guilty will now decide whether to sentence him to death or life in prison without possibility of parole.
Jurors spent just over 11 hours evaluating Tsarnaev’s guilt in two days of deliberations, following 16 days of testimony.
Defense lawyers have admitted that Tsarnaev committed the crimes of which he stands accused but said he did so at the bidding of his older brother Tamerlan, 26, who died following a gunfight with police in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Prosecutors laid out evidence that the defendant, an ethnic Chechen who immigrated from Russia a decade before the attack, had read and listened to jihadist materials, and wrote a note in the boat where he was found hiding suggesting the bombing was an act of retribution for U.S. military campaigns in Muslim-dominated countries.
