The older brother of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev kept photos of mutilated kids on his laptop, defense lawyers showed Tuesday, in hopes of shifting blame and saving their client’s neck.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defenders want to show Boston jurors that the 19-year-old was under total control of his late big brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev when they bombed the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.
Electronic forensic expert Mark Spencer, testifying for the defense, said Tamerlan used gory pictures of dead kids and adults from overseas conflicts for his laptop wallpaper.
Tamerlan also had a selfie on his computer of him with a handgun and a kid on his lap, Spencer testified.
Jurors are weighing the death penalty or life behind bars for Dzhokhar for the bombing, which killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.
Tamerlan was killed on April 19, 2013, when Dzhokhar accidentally ran over him after a shootout with police.
The defense claims Tamerlan was a bloodthirsty radical Islamist, converted after a trip to Russia in 2012.
He “always wanted to talk about how Islam was good,” testified Judith Russell, mom of Tamerlan’s widow, Katherine Russell. “Then over time, it just became a sort of, I don’t know, obsession.”