News broke today that Judy Clarke, the death penalty lawyer known for defending Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Tucson shooter Jared Loughner, is joining Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's defense team.
Stephen Jones, who defended Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, offered this advice for Clarke and the rest of the Boston marathon bombing suspect's defense team: "keep your cards close to your chest."
Tsarnaev might be able to strike a deal to avoid the death penalty if prosecutors think he has information that's useful for the government. He should keep that information to himself until prosecutors agree to make that deal, Jones told Business Insider.
"There's the possibility that the defendant knows something, even if it's a negative knowledge, about whether anyone in Russia is involved in the planning or design of this," Jones told us. "That information would be valuable to the government and they would probably be willing to pay a price to get that information."
Tsarnaev has been charged with planting two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The attack killed three people and injured more than 200 others.
If Tsarnaev's defense team can't make a deal with the government, they might try to avoid the death penalty by convincing the jury that others are responsible for the bombings, Jones said. Other responsible parties could obviously be Dzhokhar's older brother Tamerlan, who died after a police shootout and had previously traveled to the brothers' native Chechnya.
"(This case) has a lot of publicity," Jones said. "The carnage is significant. ... What makes this case perhaps unusual is that it could be self-radicalization, but there could be a broader and more sinister interpretation as to what occurred in Chechnya."
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