Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is depicted in a courtroom sketch sitting in federal court in Boston Thursday, Dec. 18, 2014. Jane Flavell Collins/AP
Boston Marathon Bomber Found Guilty
A jury will decide if he will spend life in prison or get the death penalty.
After less than the two days of deliberations, a Boston jury found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of all 30 counts for his role in the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon.
On Wednesday, Tsarnaev was convicted for a series of crimes including plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction in the attack that killed three people and wounded 260 others. He was also convicted of a separate attack that took the life of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer.
What's Next?
As we noted on Tuesday, 17 of those 30 counts were for capital crimes, meaning that the same jury that found him guilty will now continue in a new phase of the trial to determine if Tsarnaev, 21, should receive the death penalty or spend his life in prison.
The Svengali Defense Fails
Judy Clarke, Tsarnaev's lawyer, sought to paint her client as an impressionable young brother who had fallen under the sway of his Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a confrontation with police shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing.
As Henry Gass explains, this is known as the Svengali Defense, which in a legal context argues that the defendant was “a pawn of a more influential mastermind.” To counter this characterization, prosecutors pointed to an anti-American message scrawled by the younger Tsarnaev on the side of a boat shortly before he was apprehended by police.