Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Defense Rested After Calling Just Four Witnesses in Six Hours

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's defense team did not put up much of a fight. After the government spent two weeks hammering home the gruesome aftermath of the 21-year-old's role in the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon to jurors, his attorneys Judy Clarke and Miriam Conrad called just four witnesses to the stand in response.

After all, it's been something of a foregone conclusion that Tsarnaev will be convicted since the opening arguments, when Clarke came out of the gates with the startling concession that "it was him." The defense made it clear that the only goal was to keep their client from getting the death penalty—which won't be easy, with 17 of the 30 federal charges against Tsarnaev carrying capital punishment. But by demonstrating that Dzhokhar was under the influence of his radicalized older brother Tamerlan, and by painting him as a mixed-up but otherwise typical college student, Clarke and Conrad are doing their best to keep him alive.

To that end, the defense's witnesses focused squarely on Tamerlan, who was killed in the aftermath of the bombing. One indicated Dzhokhar was on campus while Tamerlan was actually purchasing the pressure cookers that would eventually become shrapnel-spewing bombs. Another witness, FBI agent Elaina Graff, said Tamerlan's prints all over the bombs and materials used to assemble them, but Dzhokhar's were not—even if they [were found]( E-MAIL Share via e-mail TO ADD A MESSAGE YOUR E-MAIL FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ LINKEDIN 33 COMMENTS PRINT By Milton J. Valencia, Kevin Cullen and Patricia WenGLOBE STAFF MARCH 31, 2015 Dzhokhar Tsarnaev AP/FILE Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Defense attorneys in the Boston Marathon bombing trial rested their case Tuesday afternoon after calling only four witnesses, and the judge ordered prosecutors and defense attorneys to present their closing arguments on Monday to the jury that will determine the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Shortly before 3 p.m., defense attorney Judy Clarke stood in front of the jury in US District Court Judge George A. O'Toole's courtroom and announced that the defense had rested its case. O'Toole urged the jurors not to discuss the case with anyone until they reach a verdict. It's ) on a plastic container holding explosives. A third witness, electronic forensics expert Mark Spencer, testified that Tamerlan had searched for bomb-making instructions on his computer, and that Dzhokhar had not.

These accounts don't exactly distance Dzhokhar from the grittiest parts of the bombing—because fingerprinting isn't necessarily accurate after an explosion, for instance—but they do at least muddy the waters a bit when it comes to whether Dzhokhar was a cold-blooded sociopath.

In one minor victory earlier in the case, the defense succeeded in discrediting a government witness who had gone through Dzhokhar's Twitter account to portray him as an America-hating terrorist. On the stand, FBI Special Agent Kimball misidentified several quotes and images from the account @J_Tsar, misconstruing a quote from a Russian pop song as a death wish and claiming a direct passage from the Koran actually came from an al Qaeda leader. (In a rare moment of comedic relief, the FBI agent thought "mad cooked" meant "crazy" rather than high.)

But prosecutors maintained a laser-like focus on the horror of the episode. As they finished up their case Monday, they actually had people crying in the jury box over the plight of eight-year-old Martin Richard, who was killed in the blast.

It's after closing arguments begin next week that we'll move on to the sentencing phase, and the trial's key moment. Attorney Judy Clark has kept Jared Lee Loughner, the Unibomber, and others off of death row, so it's certainly possible she does the same for Tsarnaev.

Perhaps the biggest decision of the whole case—whether or not Clark will let her client take the stand on his behalf—will also be made soon. If Tsarnaev does take the stand, it'll be the first time we've heard him speak, since he's been barred from giving interviews. Considering the sentencing portion of the trial hinges entirely on whether or not the jurors can feel sympathy for the Boston Bomber, his testimony could either make or break the case. If he's as affable as his friends remember him being, he could win over some jurors. But if he's as aloof as he's been so far in the trial, that might cement the idea that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a monster.

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