Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense rested Monday after calling death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean to the stand.
She marked the last of dozens of witnesses called over eight days by the defense in a bid to spare Tsarnaev from the death penalty. The prosecution opposed the move, but the court permitted her to take the stand after a lengthy debate.
A Roman Catholic nun and well-known death penalty opponent, Prejean rose to fame after the success of her book and the subsequent 1995 film adaptation, “Dead Man Walking.”
She has met Tsarnaev five times in jail, she said. The first meeting was in early March, before his trial began, and the most recent meeting was a few days ago.
“He was very open and receptive. He was pleasant,” she said.
The two discussed religion, including the differences between Catholicism and Islam, and Tsarnaev expressed remorse for his crimes and appeared sincere, she testified.
“He said it emphatically. He said no one deserves to suffer like they did,” Prejean said. “I had every reason to believe that he was taking it in and was genuinely sorry for what he did.”
She met with Tsarnaev for the same reason she has met with other inmates, she said: “just to be able to accompany them and be with them.”
The defense rested after Prejean’s testimony. A rebuttal, in which the prosecution is expected to call one or two more witnesses, will come next. Closing arguments from both sides will follow before a final prosecution rebuttal.
Tsarnaev’s trial is on track to go to the jury by the end of the week or early next week.
The trial has been lengthy. Jury selection began in January and testimony in March. Tsarnaev was found guilty on April 8 of all 30 counts against him.
Seventeen of those counts — involving the deaths of marathon spectators Krystle Campbell, Lingzi Lu and Martin Richard, and MIT police officer Sean Collier — carry a sentence of either life in prison without parole or death by lethal injection.
The defense has sought to humanize Tsarnaev, 21, in the eyes of the jury. Witnesses have told the story of a Muslim boy raised in a volatile Russian immigrant family who struggled to adjust to life in the United States as his father slipped into mental illness.
His teachers and high school and college friends say they never suspected the “laid-back,” “kind,” and “caring” Tsarnaev they knew was steeping himself in jihad and plotting mayhem.
But by the time Tsarnaev graduated from high school, his mother and older brother Tamerlan, both known as flashy dressers, began wearing conservative Muslim attire. An imam testified that Tamerlan once interrupted prayer services at a mosque, calling the imam a “hypocrite” because he compared the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Prophet Mohammed.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev also was spending hours on his computer, downloading and sharing radical jihadist material with his wife and brother, according to testimony.
The defense painted Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the mastermind of the bombing and said he bullied his little brother, a college sophomore, to help plant the homemade pressure cooker bombs in the crowd near the marathon finish line.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died days after the bombing following a gunbattle with police and being hit by a car that his brother was driving.
The defense case included testimony about Chechen history, the Tsarnaev family’s own history and the battle between passion and reason that takes place in the adolescent brain. It also included testimony from teachers, coaches and friends. An array of photos showed Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a child in class or on school field trips. He was shown, as a teen, holding a teacher’s baby and interacting with a friend’s dog at a backyard barbecue.
As yet unexplained is how the boy and teen liked by all evolved into what prosecutors portray as a terrorist so heartless that he planted his bomb behind a row of children, and stood waiting for four minutes before slipping away into the crowd as it exploded.
It has been nearly impossible to gauge his reaction in court. Most of the time, he looks like a bored student in class, but he was seen wiping away tears as one of his Russian aunts sobbed uncontrollably on the witness stand.
It seems unlikely Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will speak at this stage in the trial. So, as their deliberations begin, jurors will be left to wonder how he became the person who wrote these words while hiding in a boat after the police gunbattle:
“The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians … I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished, we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all … Now I don’t like killing innocent people, it is forbidden in Islam. Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
The jurors will also be left to wonder whether he still believes them.