On April 15, 2013, three people were killed and more than 250 injured after Tsarnaev, along with his elder brother Tamerlan, planted two pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police days after the bombing.
Tsarnaev's defense team will attempt to convince jurors to spare his life, explaining that, as a teenager, Dzhokhar was influenced by his radicalized brother, the Boston Globe said.
"They'll see him as a young boy," George Vien, a defense lawyer with Donnelly, Conroy & Gelhaar, was quoted as saying by the newspaper. During the trial the prosecution presented 17 witnesses, including victims of the blast, who spoke about how the bombings shattered their lives.
Capital punishment was declared unconstitutional in the US state of Massachusetts, of which Boston is the capital, in 1984. Tsarnaev is being tried under federal law because of the gravity of his crimes.
