[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----GA., FLA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 11



GEORGIA----impending execution

Georgia Gives Travis Hittson Execution Date of February 17, 2016


Travis Clinton Hittson is scheduled to be executed at 7 pm EST, on Wednesday, 
February 17, 2016, at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in 
Jackson, Georgia. 44-year-old Travis is convicted of the murder of 20-year-old 
Conway Uttereck on April 5, 1992, in Warner Robbins, Georgia. Travis has spent 
the last 23 years of his life on Georgia's death row.

Travis was deprived of affection growing up and rarely received affirmation 
from others, leading to depression and the belief that no one could love him. 
Travis was enlisted in the US Navy. Many shipmates testified that he was 
good-natured, although dim-witted. He worked hard and was eager to please. He 
was also known to drink frequently and do stupid things when drunk. He did not 
have a prior criminal record.

Travis Hittson, Edward Vollmer and Conway Utterbeck were all stationed together 
aboard the USS Forrestal, an aircraft carrier based in Pensacola, Florida. All 
3 men were members of the electrical division of the engineering department. 
Vollmer and Hittson were on the same work detail, while Utterbeck had a 
different assignment in the same area of the ship.

On Friday, April 3, 1992, Vollmer invited Hittson and Utterbeck to his parents 
house in Warner Robins, Georgia, for the weekend. The 3 men arrived at the 
house late Friday evening. They spent most of the day on Saturday hanging 
around the house. In the evening, Vollmer and Hittson began drinking. They 
eventually left the house, leaving Utterbeck alone.

During the early morning hours of Sunday, April 5, 1992, Vollmer and Hittson 
headed back to the house. Hittson alleged he was "very drunk" by that time. 
During the drive back, Vollmer told Hittson that Utterbeck had a hit list with 
their names on it and that Utterbeck was going to kill both of them. When the 2 
men arrived back at the house, Vollmer put on a bulletproof vest and long 
branch coat and took 2 guns from his vehicle. He gave Hittson an aluminum bat 
that was also in the car. Vollmer told Hittson that Utterbeck was inside 
waiting to shoot them.

Hittson entered the house first and found Utterbeck asleep on a recliner. 
Hittson struck him on the head with the bat. Utterbeck woke up and attempted to 
defend himself while Hittson struck him 2 more times, enough to subdue 
Utterbeck. Utterbeck, however, remained conscious. Vollmer entered the kitchen, 
where Hittson had dragged Utterbeck, and gave Hittson a firearm. Utterbeck 
asked "what did I ever do to you?" and begged for his life. Hittson shot 
Utterbeck point blank in the head.

Hittson and Vollmer stripped and robbed Utterbeck before going to a nearby 
restaurant to eat. They then returned to the house to clean up. Vollmer 
instructed Hittson to dismember the body, first using a serrated steak knife, 
then a hacksaw from a tool shed. Hittson, at Vollmer's instruction, cut off one 
of Utterbeck's hands before being to saw off the head. When Hittson became 
sick, Vollmer finished sawing off the head, the other hand, and both feet. 
Vollmer also skinned part of Utterbeck, including his genitalia. Hittson denied 
participating in such mutilation.

The duo wrapped the body parts in plastic bags. They buried the torso in a 
shallow grave in a nearby wooded area. Upon returning to the house, a local 
women noticed the car, the odd location, and the out of state plates. She wrote 
down the license plate number and identifying information about the vehicle. 
She turned this information over to police after Utterbeck's body was discover 
2 months later.

Hittson and Vollmer spent the remainder of the day cleaning up evidence of 
their crime, including hiding evidence from 2 individuals who came by the 
house. The left to return to Pensacola that evening. They disposed of 
Utterbeck's clothing and ID in a nearby dumpster and attempted to find a 
suitable place to bury Utterbeck's hands, head, and feet.

The reported to work on Monday, April 6, with body parts still in their trunk. 
That night, they buried the remaining body parts in shallow holes in a nearby 
wooded area.

Utterbeck was noted as missing and when questioned, Vollmer and Hittson claimed 
that they had dropped Utterbeck off at a bar on their way back on that Monday.

Utterbeck's torso was discovered on June 16, 1992, by loggers. Police were 
unable to identify the torso. The report from the women about the strange car 
had taken down the license plate incorrectly, preventing police from 
immediately identifying it as belonging to Vollmer. The Navy, in its attempts 
to locate Utterbeck, sent a request to other law enforcement agencies for 
information regarding unidentified bodies matching Utterbeck's description. 
Georgia police responded the same day regarding their unidentified torso.

Vollmer and Hittson were once again questioned, this time by the Navy and the 
Georgia police from Houston County. Hittson eventually confessed to the crime 
and led investigators to the remaining body parts and told them where to find 
the baseball bat he had used.

Hittson was sentenced to death, while Vollmer was sentenced to life in prison.

Please pray for peace for the family of Conway Utterbeck. Please pray for the 
family of Travis Hittson. Please pray that if Travis is innocent, lacks the 
mental competency to be executed, or should not be executed for any other 
reason that evidence will be presented prior to his execution. Please pray that 
Travis will come to find peace through a personal relationship with Jesus 
Christ, if he has not already.

(source: theforgivenessfoundation.org)






FLORIDA:

State of the Death Penalty


Michael Lambrix was supposed to die today.

3 months ago his death warrant was signed by Governor Rick Scott. Michael was 
moved to a special "Death Watch" cell, steps from the execution chamber. He was 
fitted for his burial suit and was visiting with his friends and family for 
what he assumed would be the final time.

However, thanks to the recent ruling from the United States Supreme Court that 
Florida's death penalty statute is unconstitutional, Michael was allowed to 
challenge his sentence. Attorney Brian Stull of the ACLU Capital Punishment 
Project was among those who filed a brief on behalf of Michael. Last week the 
Florida Supreme Court agreed to a stay of execution while they sort out the 
question of which death row inmates might be entitled to a new sentence.

While the courts are doing their work, I am continuing to ask the Governor and 
Cabinet to grant Michael a clemency hearing. Historically, clemency has always 
been the last safeguard of our criminal justice system, particularly in death 
penalty cases. As we know all too well, the courts don't always get it right. 
Lawyers and judges make mistakes, all the evidence isn't heard, and injustice 
results. That's why the Governor and Clemency Board have the power to commute a 
death sentence to one of life imprisonment.

In Florida, however, our Governor's office has turned the clemency process into 
a sham, despite Florida having the most unreliable death penalty system in the 
country. The last Governor to grant clemency was Bob Graham, and that was more 
than 30 years ago. Governor Scott is now executing inmates at a record pace 
without apparently considering whether they might be worthy of clemency. The 
case for clemency is particularly strong for Michael Lambrix.

Michael's case started in 1984 when a woman named Francis Smith was found 
driving the car of a man who had been reported missing. Francis led law 
enforcement to a rural area in Glades County where the bodies of a man and a 
woman were discovered. Francis claimed that Michael Lambrix had killed both 
people. She cut a deal with prosecutors to test facing any charges herself. 
However, prosecutors never disclosed this deal to the Court or to Michael's 
attorneys.

Michael's attorneys were handling their 1st death penalty case. They wouldn't 
let him testify at his trial and threatened to withdraw if he did. The first 
jury to hear this case could not reach a decision. The 2nd jury found Michael 
guilty and recommended the death penalty on a less than unanimous vote. Only 
later did it come out that a key witness had lied after being pressured. Only 
later did it come out that Francis Smith was having a sexual relationship with 
the lead State Attorney investigator in the case. Only later was DNA technology 
developed that could show that Michael was not the killer. Unfortunately for 
Michael, the courts have ruled that it is too late for any of this evidence to 
be considered.

After spending the past 31 years on death row, in solitary confinement, you 
wouldn't be surprised if Michael had been driven insane or to despair but 
that's not the case. Michael has spent his time on self-reflection and 
improvement. After focusing on his own education during his 1st years in 
confinement, Michael began reaching out to people around the world. I have 
heard from people from Australia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and more. 
Everyone wanted me to know what a positive impact Mike has had upon their 
lives. From solitary confinement on Florida's death row, Mike's letters and 
essays have been published in anthologies and shared with people around the 
world.

At a minimum, Michael Lambrix deserves a hearing before the Clemency Board 
where these facts could be presented. His case represents a failure of the 
court system and of the clemency process. Here is what I would ask you to do. 
Please contact the members of the Florida Clemency Board and deliver this 
message:

"Please grant a clemency hearing for Michael Lambrix, whose sentence was just 
stayed by the Florida Supreme Court. At a time when our state's death sentences 
are under serious scrutiny, the evidence in this case is especially 
questionable. Michael has spent the past 30 years and done everything possible 
to improve himself and to help others. Our death penalty system is in crisis, 
and Floridians deserve to know that their leaders are working to ensure that 
our justice system is in fact just. You have an opportunity to review the facts 
of this case as a member of the Clemency Board Please grant him a clemency 
hearing, so his case can be reviewed, and you don't end up executing a 
potentially innocent man."

You can write any of the folks below at The Capitol, Tallahassee, FL 
32399-1050, or better yet, call them today.

Governor Rick Scott: 850-488-7146
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi: 850-414-3300
Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater: 850-413-2820
Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam 850-245-1000
(source: aclufl.org)






USA:

Judge in Vermont death penalty case accepts challenge of law


The federal judge hearing the death penalty retrial of a Vermont man charged 
with killing a Rutland supermarket worker more than 16 years ago said he was 
open to hearing a constitutional challenge of the federal death penalty law.

In an order issued Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford said 
there was "strong disagreement" in "judicial and scholarly" circles about the 
legality of the death penalty.

"Preliminarily, and with an open mind about the arguments recently made by both 
sides, the court is looking at the constitutional challenge to the death 
penalty," Crawford wrote in the entry order dated Tuesday.

Crawford said that cases from the 1970s identified and tried to correct 
problems with the death penalty but "40 years later the question of a systemic 
violation of the Eighth Amendment remains."

Crawford scheduled a hearing for Feb. 26 so defense attorney for Donald Fell 
and prosecutors can discuss the details of the case and be ready for a hearing 
on the issues this summer.

Robert Dunham of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center said 
Crawford's ruling was an important development in the case.

"Judges don't grant evidentiary hearings if they don't have concerns about the 
issues," Dunham said.

Fell was arrested in 2000 shortly after the abduction and killing of Terry 
King, a North Clarendon grandmother. At the time, prosecutors decided the case 
should be heard in federal court. Vermont has no death penalty.

In 2002, the judge then hearing the case declared the federal death penalty 
unconstitutional. 2 years later, an appeals court overturned that ruling, 
allowing the original trial to go forward.

Fell was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to death for the abduction and killing 
of King. A judge ordered a new trial because of juror misconduct. A 2nd trial 
is scheduled for February 2017

Last fall, Fell's attorneys asked the court to rule the death penalty is cruel 
and unusual punishment prohibited by the Fifth and Eighth Amendments to the 
U.S. Constitution.

(source: Associated Press)

*******************

Meet the woman who defends America's most hated criminals (including the Boston 
bomber)


"We meet in the most tragic of circumstances," Judy Clarke, the lead defence 
lawyer representing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, began. She stood at a lectern, facing 
the jurors, in a dark suit accented by a blue-and-purple scarf that she wears 
so often it seems like a courtroom talisman. To her right, George O;Toole, the 
judge, looked at her over his spectacles. Behind her was Tsarnaev, the slim, 
soft-featured young man who was on trial for the bombing at the Boston Marathon 
on April 15, 2013 - along with San Bernardino, the worst domestic terrorist 
attack in America since 9/11. Outside the courthouse, snow from successive 
blizzards had piled up in grubby dunes.

Clarke, who lives in San Diego, despises cold weather, but she had endured an 
entire New England winter. 'Judy was in Boston for a year before the case went 
to trial, meeting with this kid,' her friend Jonathan Shapiro, who has taught 
with Clarke at Washington and Lee University School of Law, told me.

It was early March 2015, and nearly 2 years had passed since Tsarnaev, along 
with his older brother, Tamerlan, detonated 2 homemade bombs near the finish 
line of the marathon, killing 3 people and injuring 264; they then carjacked a 
Mercedes, murdered a police officer named Sean Collier, and engaged in a 
shoot-out with the cops.

Dzhokhar, 19 at the time, accidentally killed Tamerlan, who was 26, by running 
over him in the getaway car. Dzhokhar was discovered, wounded and expecting to 
die, inside a dry-docked boat in the suburb of Watertown. While he was 
recovering in hospital, Miriam Conrad, the chief federal public defender in 
Massachusetts, contacted Clarke, and Clarke decided to take the case. Clarke 
may be the best death-penalty lawyer in America.

Her efforts helped spare the lives of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Zacarias 
Moussaoui (the so-called '20th hijacker' in the 9/11 plot) and Jared Loughner 
(who killed six people and wounded 13 others, including Representative 
Gabrielle Giffords, at a Tucson mall). 'Every time Judy takes a new case, it's 
a soul-searching process for her,' Clarke's old friend Elisabeth Semel told me. 
'Because it's an enormous responsibility.'

On rare occasions when Clarke withdrew or was removed from a defence team, a 
defendant received the death penalty. But in cases that she tried through the 
sentencing phase, she had never lost a client to death row. Her speciality is 
what the Supreme Court has called 'the worst of the worst': child rapists, 
torturers, terrorists, mass murderers, and others who have committed crimes so 
appalling that even opponents of the death penalty might be tempted to make an 
exception.

Tsarnaev was indisputably guilty; the lead prosecutor, William Weinreb, 
described in his opening statement a video in which Tsarnaev is seen depositing 
a backpack directly behind an eight-year-old boy on Boylston Street and walking 
away before it explodes.

The prosecution referred to Tsarnaev as Dzhokhar, his given name, which is 
Chechen and means 'jewel'. But as Clarke addressed the jury she used the 
nickname that he had adopted as a high-school student, in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts: Jahar. In a capital case, a defence attorney seeks to humanise 
the client to the point that jurors might hesitate to condemn him to death.

Clarke has said that her job is to transform the defendant from an unfathomable 
monster into 'one of us'. Her use of the nickname also signalled genuine 
familiarity. Clarke spends hundreds of hours getting to know reviled criminals. 
Her friend Tina Hunt, a federal public defender in Georgia who has known Clarke 
for 30 years, said, 'Judy is fascinated by what makes people tick - what drives 
people to commit these kinds of crimes.

People aren't born evil. She has a very deep and abiding faith in that idea. 
Most of Clarke's success in death-penalty cases has come from negotiating plea 
deals. She often cites a legal adage: the first step in losing a death-penalty 
case is picking a jury. Clarke looked at the jurors 1 by 1. 'For the next 
several weeks, we're all going to come face to face with unbearable grief, 
loss, and pain caused by a series of senseless, horribly misguided acts carried 
out by 2 brothers,' she said.

Clarke is tall, with straight brown hair and long arms that dangle, a little 
comically, like the boughs of a weeping willow. Her style with a jury is warm, 
conversational, devoid of bombast. Whenever she paused for emphasis, the muted 
clatter of typing would fill the room as journalists with laptops live-tweeted 
the proceedings. 'There's little that occurred the week of April 15 - the 
bombings, the murder of Officer Collier, the carjacking, the shoot-out in 
Watertown - that we dispute,' she said.

Clarke was acknowledging her client's guilt. So why bother with a trial? Each 
juror had a digital monitor for viewing evidence, and Clarke flashed a 
photograph of Jahar as a young boy, dark-eyed and floppy-haired, sitting next 
to a much larger Tamerlan. Clarke said, 'What took Jahar Tsarnaev from this to 
Jahar Tsarnaev and his brother with backpacks walking down Boylston?'

"Her speciality is what the Supreme Court has called 'the worst of the worst': 
child rapists, torturers, terrorists, mass murderers"

Before-and-after photographs are standard exhibits in Clarke's repertoire. The 
effect is deliberately jarring. Clarke promised the jury that she would not try 
to minimise or excuse Tsarnaev's conduct. Instead - in a vanishingly fine 
distinction - she hoped to present his life in a way that might mitigate his 
moral culpability.

The jurors stared past her at Tsarnaev. He sat at the defence table, fiddling 
with his unruly dark hair, in a blazer and a shirt that was unbuttoned a little 
rakishly for a murder trial. 'It's going to be a lot to ask of you to hold your 
minds and hearts open,' Clarke said. 'But that is what we ask.'

Among death-penalty lawyers, Clarke is known, without irony, as St Judy, on the 
basis of her humility, her generosity and her devotion to her clients. She has 
not given an interview to the mainstream press in 20 years. But, in a 2013 
commencement speech, Clarke said that her clients have obliged her to 'redefine 
what a win means'.

Victory usually means a life sentence. Even so, Clarke said, she owes a debt of 
gratitude to her clients, for 'the lessons they've taught me - about human 
behaviour and human frailty - and the constant reminder that there but for the 
grace of God go I.' But Clarke's convictions are rooted in constitutional law, 
not the Bible, and in the courtroom she is unabashedly gladiatorial.

In 1990 she told the Los Angeles Times, 'I love the fight.' Clarke is driven by 
an intense philosophical opposition to the death penalty. She once observed 
that 'legalised homicide is not a good idea for a civilised nation.' As the 
Tsarnaev case began, Clarke told the jury that she would not contest the 'who' 
or the 'what' of the case. She would focus on the 'why'.

Clarke, who is 63, grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. At Furman College, in 
Greenville, South Carolina, she studied psychology. She married her college 
boyfriend, Thomas (Speedy) Rice - a jovial, round-faced man who also became an 
attorney. After she completed law school, at the University of South Carolina, 
they moved to San Diego, where, in 1977, she joined a small office of federal 
public defenders.

Clarke worked tirelessly on behalf of undocumented immigrants, drug dealers and 
others who could not afford a private attorney. She asked new hires to sign a 
'blood letter' committing to work at least 60 hours a week. Clarke routinely 
put in 80. A death-penalty trial consists of 2 parts: the 'guilt phase', in 
which the jury determines whether the defendant committed the crime, and the 
'penalty phase,' in which the jurors vote on a sentence.

Although Clarke had effectively conceded Tsarnaev's guilt in her opening 
statement, this did not stop prosecutors from summoning people who had lost 
limbs, or family members, in the bombing. Some entered the court in 
wheelchairs, others on prosthetic legs.

They described how their bodies had been damaged by shrapnel from the blast. 
Before-and-after photographs are potent exhibits for prosecutors as well, and 
as William Campbell testified about how his 29-year-old daughter, Krystle, was 
killed, jurors saw a photograph of her at her 1st communion, wearing a fluffy 
white dress. After each witness, Clarke murmured, 'We have no questions.' 
Sometimes she thanked them for their testimony.

In the Tsarnaev case, Clarke was joined by Miriam Conrad, the federal defender 
in Boston, and defence attorney David Bruck, whom she had met at law school. 
They maintained a quiet intimacy with their client. But Tsarnaev wasn't easy to 
manage. Each day he sauntered to the defence table and slouched in his chair, 
his rangy limbs arrayed in a posture of insouciance.

Some commentators felt that Tsarnaev was smirking, though his lawyers noted in 
court that his features had been slightly twisted by nerve damage sustained 
when he was shot in the face by the police. Clarke sat on Tsarnaev's left, and 
Conrad, an animated woman in her 50s, on his right, so that the jurors always 
saw him flanked by women.

They whispered and exchanged little jokes with him, and they touched him - a 
pat on the back, a squeeze of the arm. This was deliberate: like the Pope 
stooping to embrace a disfigured pilgrim, the women were indicating that 
Tsarnaev was not a leper.

The centrepiece of the government's case was a montage of photographs and 
videos taken on the day of the bombing. One image, captured shortly before the 
1st blast, shows a family of 5 watching runners cross the finish line. Just 
behind them, semi-obscured by a tree, stands Tsarnaev, in a backward baseball 
cap. On March 5 the family's father, Bill Richard, a slim, haunted-looking man, 
took the stand.

After the blast threw him across the street, he recalled, he scrambled to find 
his children. He located his 11-year-old, Henry, who was unharmed, and then saw 
his 7-year-old, Jane, lying by the tree. He picked her up, but her leg did not 
come with her. 'It was blown off,' he said. Bill saw his wife, Denise, hunched 
over their 8-year-old son, Martin, who had been closest to the blast.

Bill wanted to help care for Martin, but his daughter was losing blood so 
rapidly that she was not likely to survive unless he got her to an ambulance. 
He took one final look at Martin. 'I knew he wasn't going to make it,' Bill 
said. 'From what I saw, there was no chance.' He ran to an ambulance, and Jane 
survived. Denise was blinded in 1 eye. While jurors and spectators wept, a 
medical examiner described the blast's impact on Martin's body. Wearing rubber 
gloves, he held up the shorts that Martin had been wearing. They could have 
been long pants, he said - it was hard to tell. The fabric had melted.

Investigators had retrieved from Jahar's laptop a downloaded copy of Inspire, a 
publication associated with al-Qaeda, which featured an article titled 'Make a 
bomb in the kitchen of your mom'. In the Tsarnaevs' family apartment in 
Cambridge, the FBI had discovered the residue of explosives. Prosecutors also 
had what amounted to a confession from Jahar.

Believing that he was dying in the dry-docked boat, he had written a message in 
pencil on the fibreglass interior. Initially, the government wanted to remove 
the section of the boat bearing the confession and display it in court. The 
defence objected that the jury needed to see Jahar's message in its full 
context. One day in March, Judge O'Toole accompanied the lawyers, the jury and 
Tsarnaev to a warehouse where the boat sat, raised, on a trailer.

The boat was streaked with Tsarnaev's blood and riddled with more than a 
hundred bullet holes. 'God has a plan for each person,' Tsarnaev wrote. 'Mine 
was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions.' He was 'jealous' 
of Tamerlan for having achieved martyrdom. 'The US government is killing our 
innocent civilians,' he added, noting that 'Muslims are one body, you hurt one 
you hurt us all.'

The note was difficult to read, because bullets had ripped through it. But near 
the end Tsarnaev wrote, 'I don't like killing innocent people it is forbidden 
in Islam but due to said [bullet hole] it is allowed. All credit goes to 
[bullet hole].' For all the putative radicalism of these sentiments, there was 
an inescapable sense, even as the government presented its case, that Jahar 
Tsarnaev was less a soldier of God than a wayward child, curiously detached 
from his terrorist acts.

He was hardly ascetic: at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Jahar was 
known as a pot dealer. In a capital case, much of the exertion involves 
detective work. Collaborating with investigators and mental-health experts, 
Clarke assembles a 'social history' - a comprehensive biography of the client, 
often drawing on decades of family records. She tracks down relatives, 
teachers, neighbours and co-workers, looking for signs of mental illness or 
instability in the client's past.

By searching for what Tina Hunt called 'the key that turns the lock', a 
capital-defence attorney operates on the broad assumption that the perpetrators 
of terrible crimes are also victims themselves - indeed, that only victims of 
mental illness or awful circumstances could commit such crimes. You might think 
that spending time with killers would disabuse a lawyer of any illusions about 
the virtues of humanity.

But a dozen of Clarke's friends and colleagues assured me that she ardently 
believes in the essential goodness of each client. 'She has a well of 
compassion that just runs a little deeper,' Elisabeth Semel said. On April 8 
the jury convicted Tsarnaev of all 30 counts in the indictment. For the penalty 
phase, Clarke and her colleagues summoned more than 40 witnesses to tell 
Jahar's life story. He and his parents had come to America in 2002, and were 
later joined by his 2 sisters and Tamerlan.

The parents, Anzor and Zubeidat, were attractive and ambitious but volatile: 
Anzor, who found work as a mechanic, suffered from night terrors; Zubeidat was 
by turns smothering and neglectful. The Tsarnaevs lived in a cramped apartment 
in Cambridge, and their immigrant hopes gradually eroded. Jahar's sisters 
married young; each had a child, got divorced, and returned home.

Tamerlan failed in his efforts at a professional boxing career, and at 
everything else he tried. He married an American, Katherine Russell, and they 
soon had a child. She and the baby joined the others in the apartment. By 2010, 
Tamerlan had become immersed in a strain of Salafist Islam that had taken root 
on the internet.

In 2012 he travelled to Dagestan for 6 months, hoping to participate in jihad, 
though he apparently whiled away most of his time in cafes, talking politics. 
(According to the Boston Globe, Tamerlan heard voices and may have suffered 
from undiagnosed schizophrenia.) Jahar was the sweetheart of his family - a 
doe-eyed, easygoing child who adored his older brother and made friends easily.

He did well in school, was moved up a year and become captain of his 
high-school wrestling team. Several tearful teachers took the stand and 
described him as bright and gentle. By the time he started college, however, 
his family was falling apart. His parents separated and left the country. 
Tamerlan, meanwhile, was becoming more radical, walking around Cambridge in the 
kind of flowing white robe one sees in Saudi Arabia.

Neither the government nor the defence claimed that the brothers were part of a 
larger conspiracy; rather, in Clarke's awkward phrasing, Tamerlan 
'self-radicalised' through the internet. The question at the heart of the 
defence was whether Jahar did, too. In college, he spent evenings getting high 
and playing video games with friends. Several of them testified about his 
kindness. Some didn't even know that he was a Muslim.

The defence argued that Jahar didn't engineer the terrorist plot. Tamerlan 
bought the bomb materials, made the bombs, and shot Officer Collier. In Chechen 
culture, 1 defence expert testified, an older brother is a dominant personality 
whom the younger brother must obey. A cognitive scientist testified that 
teenaged brains are impulsive, like cars with powerful engines and faulty 
brakes.

Tsarnaev was young, had no history of violent conduct, and fell under the spell 
of a charismatic mentor. One of Tsarnaev's teachers, whose husband had been his 
soccer coach, testified, 'He's very coachable. He would do what the coach 
said.' Jahar Tsarnaev sat silently at the defence table, occasionally reaching 
for a carafe of water to refill his attorneys' cups. There was such dissonance 
between the grotesque crime and the mild- mannered perpetrator that, outside 
the courtroom, an avid group of supporters, many of them young women, 
maintained that he must be the victim of a frame-up.

"It's a defence you don't often have recourse to in these types of cases: "He 
was a good kid, one of ours,"' Carol Steiker, a death-penalty specialist at 
Harvard Law School, told me. 'He also reads as white, which is helpful in these 
kinds of cases.' One of the cameras in the courtroom was positioned to 
approximate the judge's view from the bench. David Bruck objected that the 
camera violated the defence team's 'zone of privacy', but the camera stayed, 
offering an intimate perspective of Tsarnaev's detachment. He whispered and 
sometimes smiled with his attorneys, but he avoided looking at the witnesses, 
instead examining his fingernails or doodling.

'I really miss the person that I knew,' one of his college friends, Alexa 
Guevara, said, through tears, on the stand. She tried mightily to catch his 
eye, but he would not meet her gaze. Tsarnaev broke this mask of indifference 
only once. His aunt Patimat Suleimanova came from Dagestan to testify. But when 
she took the stand she was immediately convulsed by sobs. Tsarnaev dabbed tears 
from his eyes until she was escorted from the stand.

This marked, in some ways, a promising development for the defence - a signal 
that the defendant had feelings, after all, and that his death would devastate 
his family. At the same time, it underscored Tsarnaev's implacability during 
weeks of harrowing testimony about the devastation he had caused. Clarke, in 
her opening statement, said that Jahar's terrorist path was 'created' and 
'paved by his brother'.

If he had fallen under the sway of a violent older sibling, it seemed logical 
that Tsarnaev, after 2 lonely years in prison, might feel remorse. But 
Tsarnaev's demeanour betrayed no contrition. This was critical because, 
according to studies, capital juries are heavily influenced by whether or not 
the defendant shows remorse.

To prove that Tsarnaev was untroubled by his crime, the prosecution presented a 
still image taken by a surveillance camera in a holding cell in the courthouse. 
The image was captured several months after the attacks. Tsarnaev wears orange 
scrubs and scowls at the camera, his middle finger raised.

'This is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, unconcerned, unrepentant, unchanged,' 1 of the 
prosecutors said. The defence immediately moved to show the jury the video from 
which the still was taken, and it emerged that Tsarnaev had aimed other 
gestures at the camera, including a 2-fingered gang sign, in the casual pose of 
a teenager on Instagram. The camera had a mirrored surface, and he carefully 
tousled his hair.

Watching Tsarnaev in court, I sometimes wondered if Clarke was trying to save 
someone who didn't want to be saved. Perhaps he still envied Tamerlan's 
martyrdom. In death-penalty work, clients often come to desire a swift end. 
They may be suicidal, or hopeless, or insane; they may have made a considered 
decision that death by injection would be preferable to a lifetime of solitary 
confinement. Such clients, known as "volunteers', present death-penalty lawyers 
with a dilemma.

An attorney's job is to advocate vigorously for a client's interests. But there 
may come a point at which that duty diverges from the imperative to save the 
client's life. David Bruck made a dramatic case against the death penalty. He 
has worked as an attorney or an adviser on scores of capital cases. He showed 
the jurors a photograph of ADX, the federal maximum-security prison in 
Florence, Colorado, where several of Clarke's former clients are held: a series 
of stark buildings nestled into barren, snow-covered terrain. It called to mind 
Siberia.

If Tsarnaev was spared the death penalty, Bruck explained, he would live a life 
of near total isolation at ADX. He would have no contact with other inmates or 
the outside world. If the jury delivered a death sentence, Bruck continued, its 
decision would surely be followed by more than a decade of appeals, each one 
accompanied by a new wave of publicity for Tsarnaev and pain for the victims. 
Only then - maybe - would he be executed.

Supporters of the death penalty often argue that it brings 'closure' to the 
victims, but Bruck's logic seemed unassailable: if you want a sense of 
finality, send him away. 'No martyrdom,' he said. 'Just years and years of 
punishment, day after day, while he grows up to face the lonely struggle of 
dealing with what he did.'

On April 17, under the headline 'To end the anguish, drop the death penalty', 
the Boston Globe carried an open letter from Bill and Denise Richard. 'The 
defendant murdered our 8-year-old son, maimed our 7-year-old daughter, and 
stole part of our soul,' they wrote. 'We know that the government has its 
reasons for seeking the death penalty, but the continued pursuit of that 
punishment could bring years of appeals and prolong reliving the most painful 
day of our lives.'

On a May morning, as gulls hung on the breeze in Boston Harbour, Clarke 
addressed the jury a final time. She dismissed the idea of Jahar as a radical, 
arguing that he had been in his brother's thrall. 'If not for Tamerlan,' she 
said, the attack 'would not have happened'. She played the video of Jahar 
putting his backpack behind the Richard family. 'He stops at the tree, not at 
the children,' she insisted, a little lamely. 'It does not make it better, but 
let's not make his intent worse than it was.'

Clarke called Tsarnaev a 'kid'. In his confession inside the boat, she argued, 
he was merely parroting the rhetoric of others. 'He wrote words that had been 
introduced to him by his brother.' At one point Clarke nearly conceded the 
logic of capital punishment. 'Dhzokar Tsarnaev is not the worst of the worst,' 
she said. 'That's what the death penalty is reserved for.'

Then again you could argue that if Tsarnaev wasn't among the worst of the worst 
Clarke would never have taken the case. And Clarke - who once defended someone 
who slashed a pregnant woman's belly and strangled her to death in order to 
steal the baby from her womb - has devoted her career to the notion that even 
the very worst should be spared. But she knew that these jurors didn't oppose 
the death penalty, so she appealed to their sympathy, reminding them that they 
were standing in judgment on one of their own.

As her closing neared its crescendo, her normally casual demeanour assumed a 
frantic urgency, and she gesticulated - pounding her fist, slicing the air - as 
if she were conducting an orchestra. 'Mercy is never earned,' Clarke said. 
'It's bestowed.' Clarke reminded the jury that they were making a moral 
judgment. 'This is an individual decision for each of you,' she said.

After 14 hours of deliberation, the jury returned with a death sentence. All 
but three of the jurors believed that, even without the influence of Tamerlan, 
Jahar would have carried out the attacks on his own. Only 2 believed that the 
defendant was remorseful.

'Judy would probably say, if the public saw everything she sees, it would look 
at the client or the case differently,' David Bruck once remarked. But in this 
instance Clarke had failed to paint a picture of her young client that was 
moving enough to save him. Judge O'Toole had warned the jurors not to read 
anything into the defendant's manner in court, but Tsarnaev's inscrutability 
appears to have hurt him. Most jurors declined to speak to the press, but one 
of them told the Daily Beast, 'My conscience is clear ... And I don't know that 
he has one.'

Unbeknown to that juror, and to the public in Boston, Tsarnaev had already 
expressed remorse for his actions. On June 24, 6 weeks after the jury 
dispersed, Judge O'Toole presided over the formal sentencing of Tsarnaev, and 
Clarke made a fascinating remark. 'There have been comments over time with 
regard to Mr Tsarnaev lacking remorse,' she said. 'It's incumbent upon us to 
let the court know that Mr Tsarnaev offered to resolve this case without a 
trial.'

Tsarnaev had not simply agreed to plead guilty before the trial, Clarke said; 
he had written a letter of apology. But it was never shared with the jury, 
because the government had it sealed. I spoke recently to Nancy Gertner, a 
former federal judge in Massachusetts who now teaches at Harvard. 'This could 
have been an immediate plea,' she said. 'He was prepared to cooperate with the 
government. Why go through with it all?' (A spokesman for the prosecutors 
declined to comment on why the letter was suppressed.)

A 2nd juror, 23-year-old Kevan Fagan, was asked by the radio station WBUR about 
the Richard family's letter opposing the death penalty. 'If I had known that, I 
probably - I probably would change my vote,' he said. Before Judge O'Toole 
could deliver the death sentence, Clarke said, 'Mr Tsarnaev is prepared to 
address the court.' He rose, next to her, wearing a dark jacket and a grey 
button-down shirt. 'I would like to begin in the name of Allah, the exalted and 
glorious, the most gracious, the most merciful,' he said.

He spoke in a thick accent that sounded vaguely Middle Eastern. (Before the 
bombing, he had sounded more conventionally American.) 'This is the blessed 
month of Ramadan, and it is the month of mercy from Allah to his creation, a 
month to ask forgiveness of Allah,' he continued. Turning to Clarke and her 
colleagues, Tsarnaev said that he wanted to thank his attorneys. 'I cherish 
their company,' he said. 'They're lovely companions.'

Then he thanked the jury that had sentenced him to death. The Prophet Muhammad, 
he noted, had said that 'if you are not merciful to Allah's creation, Allah 
will not be merciful to you'. Tsarnaev went on, 'I'd like to now apologise to 
the victims.' He recalled that after the bombings he began to learn about the 
injured and the dead. 'Throughout this trial, more of those victims were given 
names.' When the witnesses testified, they conveyed 'how horrendous it was, 
this thing I put you through'.

Tsarnaev did not look at the many victims who had gathered in the courtroom. He 
stared straight ahead, his hands clasped around his belt buckle. 'I am sorry 
for the lives that I've taken, for the suffering that I've caused,' he said. He 
prayed that the victims might find 'healing', and he asked Allah 'to have mercy 
upon me and my brother and my family'.

Tsarnaev spoke in precisely the language of religious devotion that the 
prosecutors might have predicted. But people often change considerably between 
the ages of 19 and 21. He had spent those 2 years in solitary confinement, with 
plenty of time to ponder his actions - and to read the Koran. I wondered, as he 
addressed the court, if Tsarnaev was mature enough - or distant enough in time 
from the bombing and from the death of his brother - to have arrived at a firm 
evaluation of what he'd done. Tsarnaev will not be executed any time soon.

Since 1988, 75 defendants have been given the federal death penalty, but only 
three have been put to death. Appeals drag on for decades. The very scenario 
that Bill and Denise Richard hoped to avoid - the endless replay of the city's 
trauma in the interests of retributive justice - will come to pass. Clarke has 
been known to say, of a death sentence that has not yet led to execution, 'This 
case has a few miles to go.'

Clarke's friends say that the loss has been devastating to her. But the people 
who know her agree that this will not be her last case - she will pick herself 
up and keep fighting. (Last month Clarke and her colleagues filed an appeal 
against his conviction for murder and other related charges.) Tsarnaev 
concluded his courtroom remarks with a few final encomiums to Allah. Then he 
sat stiffly and waited for Judge O'Toole to deliver the death sentence. Clarke 
reached out and placed her hand on his back.

(source: The Telegraph)