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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev went on trial for his life Wednesday in the Boston Marathon bombing with his own lawyer bluntly telling the jury he committed the crime. But she argued that he had fallen under the influence of his older brother.

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“It was him,” Judy Clarke, one of the nation’s foremost death-penalty defence attorneys, said of Tsarnaev in a startling opening statement in the biggest terrorism trial in the U.S. since the Oklahoma City bombing nearly 20 years ago.

Laying out an argument aimed at saving Tsarnaev not from a guilty verdict but from the death penalty, Clarke said that the defence will not try to “sidestep” his involvement in the “senseless, horribly misguided acts carried out by two brothers.”

“The evidence will not establish and we will not argue that Tamerlan put a gun to Dzhokhar’s head or that he forced him to join in the plan,” Clarke said, “but you will hear evidence about the kind of influence that this older brother had.”