Tsarnaev? Death penalty? Your thoughts....

[avebury]

97. I have a problem with the way the Prosecutors ran the trial.

They used a lot of victim impact testimony during the guilt or innocence phase of the trial which was to ramp things up to a greater chance of not just getting a guilty verdict but the death penalty as well.

If you look at the Federal Trials for Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols you would see that was what they did in McVeigh's trial but not in Nichols trial. And we all know which one received the death penalty and which one did not.

To me, victim impact testimony should be in the punishment phase of a trial. If I were on a jury, I would not allow victim impact testimony to sway me in the guilt or innocence phase of a trial. I would expect a Prosecutor to provide evidence that a defendant committed a crime and leave the emotions out of it. Jury trials are serious business and I would be suspect of a Prosecutor that was overly reliant upon emotional victim impact testimony over hard provable evidence. In the case of the Boston bomber, it is pretty clear that he was guilty but the way the Prosecutor ran his/her case would probably lose him/her any chance of a death penalty vote from me. The Prosecutor clearly was playing on the jurors emotions.