Celebrated defence lawyer Judy Clarke will launch her bid Monday to save 21-year-old convicted killer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from the death penalty for bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013.
Clarke, one of America's best-known death penalty experts, will make an opening statement and present witnesses in the penalty phase of the trial that will see Tsarnaev sentenced to death or life in prison.
The April 15, 2013 double bombing killed three people and wounded 264 others in one of the deadliest attacks in the United States since 9/11.
Tsarnaev was convicted on all 30 counts this month by the 12-person jury that will now determine his fate: execution or life without parole.
The defense will plead extenuating circumstances and do everything to humanise the young Muslim of Chechen origin, who moved with his family from Kyrgyzstan to Dagestan to the United States as a young child.
He was scared of and manipulated by his radical, older brother Tamerlan, 26, the true mastermind of the attacks, they will argue.
Tamerlan was shot dead by police while the pair were on the run.
If anyone can get Tsarnaev off the death penalty, experts believe it is Clarke, in her early 60s, and a tireless opponent of capital punishment.
"That's her speciality," said Robert Bloom, professor at Boston College Law School. "She knows how to do it, she is possibly the best lawyer in the country (for that)," he added.
Over the last 20 years she has saved some of America's most notorious killers from death: Susan Smith who drowned her two children; "Unabomber" serial murderer Theodore Kaczynski; Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted over the 9/11 attacks; Eric Rudolph, who bombed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics; and Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in 2011.
She knows how to humanise her clients. She unmasks their sufferings, and their social and family backgrounds. She does not excuse but she seeks to understand and to explain.
"None of us, including those accused of crime, wants to be defined by the worst moment, or worst day of our lives," she told the magazine of the Washington and Lee University School of Law, where she taught, in 2010.
