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Tsarnaev brothers were patsies of Obama administration: Scholar

Saturday, 16 May 2015 5:43 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 17 May 2015 1:58 PM ]

The conviction and sentencing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an indication that “the United States has sunk to a new low,” Fetzer said.

An American scholar says Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were the “patsies” of the Obama administration and that Dzhokhar’s conviction and death sentence over 2013 Boston Marathon bombing is a “huge scam”.

“All the authorities know that this was a drill and that he had nothing to do with it,” said James Henry Fetzer, who is also a retired professor in Madison, Wisconsin.

Dzhokhar, 21, was sentenced to death by a US jury on Friday for helping his elder brother Tamerlan carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon attack that killed three people and wounded 264 others.

The 12-member federal jury unanimously agreed to put him on death row following 14 hours of deliberations over three days. He was previously convicted on April 8, 2015.

Tamerlan, 26, was killed on April 19, 2013 in a shootout with police in Watertown, Massachusetts.

“He and his brother Tamerlan were simply patsies who were chosen to benefit the political agenda of the Obama administration,” Fetzer told Press TV on Saturday.

“This is an outrage, this is a scandal, this is an indication that the United States has sunk to a new low,” Fetzer said. “The officials all know this is a huge scam, this is an outrage, this is disgusting, this is as low as it gets, this is what has become of the United States of America today.”

Prosecutors described Dzhokhar, who is an ethnic Chechen, as influenced by al-Qaeda who carried out the attack as an act of revenge for the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His death sentence does not mean he will face imminent execution and defense attorneys are likely to appeal the sentence, but that would last for many years.

The death penalty remains highly controversial in Massachusetts, which has not put anyone to death in almost 70 years and which abolished capital punishment for state crimes in 1984.

According to a poll released by Boston Globe last month, fewer than 20 percent of the people in the state support death for Tsarnaev, down from 33 percent in September 2013.

AHT/AT

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