3.Tamerlan Tsarnaev's Prior Acts and Coercive Control
3 linesMR. WEINREB: I'm sorry, your Honor. I'm sorry to interrupt. But before we move completely away from the Todashev motion, that was a motion not just to exclude evidence of the Waltham triple homicides but evidence of other prior bad acts by Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
And the point there is the jury is going to be asked to determine -- to look at the relative culpability of these two defendants -- I shouldn't say "two defendants" -- of the defendant and his brother for the crimes that were committed in this case. But that is different from asking them either explicitly or implicitly to draw a comparison between Tamerlan Tsarnaev's character and the defendant's character, which is not something that is appropriate for them to do in picking a sentence for the defendant.
We are aware of certain other acts that would be -- fall into the category of prior bad acts by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, specifically, allegations that as far as I know were never proved anywhere, that he engaged in acts of domestic violence both against a former girlfriend who did, in fact, file a complaint which she later dropped and did, in fact, obtain a restraining order, as well as alleged acts of diametric violences against his ex -- his widow, Katherine Russell -- or Katherine Tsarnaev, nee Russell -- that Katherine Russell herself has always consistently denied ever occurred and are simply based on hearsay or rumor. They're based on beliefs or the statements of girlfriends of hers who never liked Tamerlan in the first place, and no charges there were ever brought; there are no sworn statements about it, no eyewitnesses to it, nothing like that.
We believe that that evidence should be excluded both because it's irrelevant and because clearly the risk of it misleading and confusing the jury and distracting them from the task at hand outweighs any probative value that it might have. And it's really hard to imagine what probative value it could possibly have. It's not a propensity to do anything that's relevant in this case; it's not something that the defense has ever offered any evidence or even proffered that the defendant knew about, and even if he did, they haven't proffered that it had some effect on him like he thought he might be the victim of violence by his brother or anything like that.
There may be other bad acts by the defendant that the defense intends to offer that we don't even know about. We would ask that before they be offered, that we be given notice of them so that we have an opportunity to move ahead of time, before they pop out of some witness's mouth on the witness stand, to evaluate whether we believe they should be excluded under the appropriate part of the FDPA.
MR. FICK: There is a wide variety of evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev exercised coercive control over other people by violence and intimidation both directly and by reputation. It's hard to imagine something that could be more probative in a situation where a key part of the defense is to say that Tamerlan was the dominant person in the sibling relationship; Tamerlan over many years exercised coercive control over his brother both by violence and other means. And whether or not Jahar knew about any particular instance of domestic violence or other kinds of violence that Tamerlan committed, all of those things tend to make the overall suggestion that Tamerlan exercised coercive control over other people by violence and by other forms of coercion are more likely to be true. So that's sort of one category of information that's clearly central to the familial relationships that are at issue here.
The second sort of category that -- I don't know if the government considers these to be bad acts but I think are particularly relevant here are various kinds of outbursts that Tamerlan had in various settings, including at the mosque and other places of a religious nature, of a radical jihadist nature, outbursts expressing extremely -- well, outbursts expressing extreme views or having extreme reactions to things that an ordinary person would not react in an extreme way to. All of that is probative of the nature, extent and timing of Tamerlan's radicalization. He was an extraordinarily opinionated, I guess one would say, person, and he sought to impose his views and his views of proper behavior and his views of Islam on the world, on other people in a variety of ways. And to understand the relationship between Tamerlan and Jahar, it's really critical for the jury to see the full picture of how Tamerlan behaved in various aspects of his life.
MR. WEINREB: Your Honor, we believe those outbursts in the mosque are essentially irrelevant, but we don't think they rise to the level of being so misleading or distracting that they need to be excluded, so we don't object to those.