Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ‘influenced by brother’

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev went on trial for his life in the Boston Marathon bombing with his own lawyer bluntly telling the jury he committed the crime. But she argued he had fallen under the influence of his older brother.

“It was him”, Judy Clarke, one of the nation’s foremost death-penalty defence attorneys, said of Tsarnaev in a startling opening statement in the biggest terrorism trial in the US since the Oklahoma City bombing nearly 20 years ago.

Laying out an argument aimed at saving Tsarnaev not from a guilty verdict but from the death penalty, Clarke said that the defence will not try to “sidestep” his involvement in the “senseless, horribly misguided acts carried out by two brothers”.