Free Republic

His logic’s straightforward. It’s easy to prove that Tsarnaev did the deed but in order to prove that he’s a “terrorist” and therefore eligible for the death penalty, you have to also prove that his intent was to terrorize the population. And the only hard evidence of that might be his own statements — which will be inadmissible if a judge rules that the feds the “public safety” exception to Miranda doesn’t apply in this case. I must be missing something, though, because as I read the statute, I don’t see where the feds need to prove any specific terroristic...

A top defense attorney says the goal of any lawyer representing the Boston Marathon bombing suspect won't be to get him off, but simply to save his life. "There doesn't seem to be a lot of questions as to factual guilt, at least from what you read in the newspaper and has been all over the TV," Thomas Anthony Durkin, a former United States Attorney whose work has included defending an associate of the 9/11 terrorists, told The Luke Burbank Show. Federal prosecutors charged bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, in his hospital room Monday with using a weapon of mass...

Four months ago, the deceased Boston bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Suspect No.1), who was killed early Friday morning in a shootout with police, uploaded to his YouTube Channel an eight-minute lecture by the radical Australian Muslim preacher Sheikh Feiz Mohammed denouncing the Harry Potter movies for glorifying and promoting paganism. “How can you allow your children to watch this?” the sheikh demands in the table-thumping lecture. “This film glorifies, magnifies, promotes paganism…What does Harry Potter do and his devilish schoolmates, what do they do? They cast spells, learn magic, brew potions, learn how to tell the future…And this is called...

Via Michael Goldfarb, a complement to Erick Erickson’s post today at Red State about Republican aides turning desperate, shrill, and repulsive as the Gang of Eight bill runs into stumbling blocks. Quote: MORNING MINDMELD, from GOP Senate aide whose boss favors immigration reform: “The … analysis that the Boston attacks are a setback for immigration reform appears wrongheaded, as we learn more about the story. The fault here wasn’t our immigration system, since the suspects immigrated legally a decade ago as kids and apparently were radicalized here. If anything, the fault lies with our society and domestic intelligence services. Given...

The online activism organization Change.org currently hosts a petition to President Obama asking him to guarantee “wrongfully accused” Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a “fair trial,” citing a lack of evidence to condemn Tsarnaev. Change.org, which receives funding from groups including Amnesty International and the Humane Society, features a petition entitled, “Petition to guarantee Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the right to a fair trial,” created by Anita Temisheva of Chicago, Illinois. The petition has already netted more than 2,000 signatures. “We believe that within the chaos caused by the Boston Marathon explosion, two young men were wrongfully accused of something they...

The Boston bombers were planning more attacks across the city and were already building the bombs to do this says the city's police commissioner Ed Davis. Davis says it's his belief that 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan 'were going to attack other individuals' — and Davis says that's based on the evidence at the scene and the cache of weapons the brothers had at their disposal. However, Davis claims releasing photos of the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects 'forced them out of their hideout' and spurred them into Thursday and Friday's deadly night time car chaos and...

Federal investigators have begun questioning hospitalized Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and he is responding, according to reports on Sunday night. NBC News’ Pete Williams reported that Tsarnaev, 19, is beginning to respond to a team of federal investigators mainly through writing. Williams reported that he is being questioned for brief periods and that he has difficulty communicating because of his throat injuries. Tsarnaev was listed in serious but stable condition at a Boston hospital where he has remained since being detained by authorities on Friday, NBC said. He has been intubated and sedated, according to reports. ABC News...

Motive still a giant incomprehensible mystery. But there are suspicions that he was one of those Tea Party NRA type of people. Certainly his peaceful tolerant religion notorious for its love of kites, puppies, infidels and women had nothing to do with it. NPR has done some background on Tamerlan Tsarnaev who, it turns out, was surprisingly Muslim. (Not that NPR can say so.) His Islamic attitudes extended to his treatment of American women. LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Well, these women were close friends and roommates of Tamerlan’s girlfriend, Katherine Russell, and they knew him for several years while they...

Most Americans believe that having a gun in the home makes you safer: A Washington Post-ABC News poll — not a Rasmussen or some Rove outfit, but the Post and an alphabet network — finds that by a wide margin, more Americans believe that having a gun in the home makes it safer than not. It’s not even close. A majority — 51% — believe that having a gun in the home makes that home safer. Only 29% believe the opposite. During the lock-down of Boston yesterday there was a fair amount of Twitter chatter about whether people in Boston...

David Sirota got at least half his wish. It appears the bombing of the Boston Marathon was indeed carried out by Caucasians--by which we mean not just persons of pallor but natives of Caucasia, a region that spans from northern Iran and northeastern Turkey, through Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and into the Russian Federation. "The suspects--brothers Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 years old, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19--were identified Friday in Monday's bombings," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Authorities said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a confrontation with police in Watertown, Mass. An intense manhunt was under way for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev." The Tsarnaev...

Watertown police chief Edward Deveau said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old suspected Boston Marathon bomber who was captured alive on Friday, killed his older brother Tamerlan by driving over him and dragging his body through the street with a carjacked SUV Thursday night. Deveau, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Saturday, said police officers were handcuffing Tamerlan, who had run out of ammunition, when Dzhokhar came at them in a carjacked SUV. Watertown officers were able to get out of the way. The brothers were armed with pipe bombs, firearms, and explosives and had been in a firefight with...

WATERTOWN, Mass.—Investigators in the Boston Marathon bombing case shifted their focus Saturday to hunting for a motive and preparing charges after apprehending a 19-year-old college student Friday night. The charges against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who remained hospitalized with severe injuries, could be filed this weekend, but it might take longer as law enforcement officials continue investigating numerous crime scenes in and around Boston. Investigators were also eager to talk to Mr. Tsarnaev, who was listed in serious condition after being badly injured early Friday morning in a firefight with police officers that left his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, dead. Investigators have...

Boston and the nation have gone through a trauma and a degree of catharsis over the attack in Boston, and now the battle to define how we discuss that incident and the perps is underway. Media progressives openly hoped and predicted the perp would turn out to be a white male who followed Sarah Palin on Twitter, and are now trying to recover from the awful truth that Islam and jihad look like the motives. Yesterday in these pages, J. Robert Smith accurately predicted how the progressives would frame the accused: The Brothers Tsarnaev grew up in an environment of...

Updated 4 p.m. Friday related to arrest versus conviction issue: One of the Chechen terrorists who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings could have been deported years ago after a criminal arrest and/or conviction and the other was granted American citizenship on the 11th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a wild shootout with police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence arrest and conviction, according to a Judicial Watch source. That means the Obama administration missed an opportunity...

Filmmaker Michael Moore has now sounded off on the ongoing situation surrounding suspected Boston Marathon bombers and Muslim terrorists Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan. Naturally, he blames America:(TWEET-AT-LINK)

I’ve been monitoring this Yahoo News site linked below with its regular updates from news media types during this evening’s events in Watertown. Below is a screencap taken immediately after the arrest of terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Tsarnaev is allegedly complicit in the murders of at least three individuals, including 8 year-old Martin Richard – and the maiming and dismemberment of several others. LATEST ON THE BOSTON MARATHON EXPLOSIONS via Explosions at the Boston Marathon News & Headlines.

The country if not half the world is on edge Friday morning after a deadly all-night chase through Cambridge and Watertown left one of the Boston bombing suspects dead and one at large. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old immigrant from Kyrgyzstan, is the suspect on the loose, and his apparent ties with Chechnya are stirring up the region's struggle for attention over the course of the past few decades. The predominantly Muslim region in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia has been fighting for its independence since the fall of the Soviet Union. It's been a bloody fight, too. Though it...

It started with the false claim that a Saudi man was a suspect (he was actually a victim), something the networks ran with (including the rumour that he had been thrown into a cage) and were then forced to retract. Then there was a second “attack” at the JFK library that turned out to be an unrelated fire. Pundits weighed in uselessly, calling for the deaths of all Muslims in the world on Twitter or else somehow laying responsibility at the feet of the otherwise peaceful and democratic Tea Party (was Sarah Palin anywhere near the scene – we have...

One of the curious, but also most predictable, responses to the Boston Marathon bombings from the Left has been the fervent expression — amounting nearly to a prayer — that the perpetrator or perpetrators of this act of mass murder be “homegrown,” preferably white, male, Christian, and conservative. Why? Why does the Left prefer to have its terrorism served up by Timothy McVeigh rather than Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad? It’s an interesting question. That the Left exhibits this prejudice is, like Falstaff’s dishonesty, “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” David Sirota, writing at Salon, gives almost comic expression to the...

While CNN and MSNBC were broadcasting President Obama‘s remarks on the failed gun control compromise, Fox News’ The Five crew were discussing the media reaction to the Boston Marathon bombings. Co-host Greg Gutfeld went after media figures who he said attempted to “ascribe blame to people they already hate.” Andrea Tantaros reviewed what she sees as a history of “journalistic malpractice” after major incidents like this one, from the furor over the Sarah Palin target map after Tuscon to ABC News’ Brian Ross linking the Aurora shooter to the Tea Party. She said that there seemed to be no “repercussions”...