BOSTON (Reuters) - The jurors who will determine if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty of killing three people and injuring 264 in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing asked the judge on Wednesday to clarify two legal terms before they began a second day of deliberations.
Tsarnaev, 21, is accused of setting off a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the race's finish line on April 15, 2013, along with his older brother, Tamerlan. He faces a 30-count federal indictment that also includes charges of killing a police officer three days later and hurling pipe bombs during a shootout with authorities in a residential neighborhood.
The jury had two questions about the law for U.S. District Judge George O'Toole. O'Toole explained that the term "conspiracy," which appears in several of the charges, applied to a plot between Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev that existed from February 2013 through April 19, 2013, when the younger brother was caught.
Jurors also asked if "aiding and abetting," which also appears in several of the charges, are separate ideas and were told by the judge that the terms are a single concept.
Jurors spent just over seven hours evaluating Tsarnaev’s guilt on the first day of deliberations on Tuesday, following 16 days of testimony.
If they find Tsarnaev guilty, the same jury will hear a second round of evidence before determining whether to sentence him to death or to life in prison without possibility of parole.
In a sign that they were focused on that question, defense lawyers have admitted that their client committed the crimes of which he stands accused but said he did so at the bidding of Tamerlan, 26, who died following the gunfight with police in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Prosecutors laid out evidence that the defendant, an ethnic Chechen who immigrated from Russia a decade before the attack, had read and listened to jihadist materials, and wrote a note in the boat where he was found hiding suggesting the bombing was an act of retribution for U.S. military campaigns in Muslim-dominated countries.
(Editing by Scott Malone and Lisa Von Ahn)
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