Death penalty to fore in US bomb case

From the moment US prosecutors stand up on Wednesday and begin their case against accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, their minds and those of their defence counterparts will be focused on just one thing: The death penalty.

Tsarnaev, 21, is accused of killing three people and injuring 264 with a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs left at the race’s crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, in the largest mass-casualty attack on US soil since September 11, 2001.

The ethnic Chechen, who moved to the US from Russia with his family a decade before the attack, could be sentenced to death if he is convicted of charges that also include the fatal shooting of a police officer three days later as he tried to flee the city.