Vox Sentences: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty of 17 capital crimes. Will he die for it?

1. All 30 counts

A TV near the site of the Boston Marathon bombing displays Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's picture. (Mario Tama/Getty Images News)

• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been convicted by a federal jury on all 30 charges brought against him for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• This outcome was expected; Judy Clarke, one of Tsarnaev's lawyers, admitted in her opening statement, "It was him." The case went to trial most likely to preserve the option for an appeal and because a plea deal sparing Tsarnaev death couldn't be reached.

  [ABC News / Brian Ross, Megan Chuchmach, Aaron Katersky, and Michele McPhee]

• Clarke's defense emphasized Tsarnaev's youth and painted his late older brother Tamerlan as the instigator: "We don’t deny that [Dzhokhar] fully participated in the events, but if not for Tamerlan, it would not have happened."

  [NYT / Katharine Q. Seelye and Richard Oppel]

• Among the charges Tsarnaev was convicted of: "conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death" and "use of a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death; aiding and abetting."

  [Boston Globe]

• 17 of the charges carry the death penalty.

  [Boston Globe / Milton Valencia, Patricia Wen, Kevin Cullen, John Ellement, and Martin Finucane]

• Now the second phase of the trial begins, in which the prosecution will call witnesses (likely including victims of Tsarnaev) to support its case for executing him; the defense "is likely to call experts to talk about Tsarnaev’s troubled upbringing and family life, meant to convince the jury that their client deserves some sympathy and is not deserving of a death sentence."

  [Boston Globe / Milton Valencia and Patricia Wen]

• Boston Globe editorial: give Tsarnaev a life sentence, not death.

  [Boston Globe editorial board]

• Clarke specializes in cases like this, and previously helped Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph avoid death sentences.

  [Vanity Fair / Mark Bowden]

• For more, read German Lopez's full explainer about the case, Tsarnaev's role in executing the attacks, and his and his brother's motivations.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

2. Justice for Walter Scott

A rally to protest the death of Walter Scott on April 8, 2015, in North Charleston, South Carolina. (Richard Ellis/Getty Images)

• Michael Slager, a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, has been charged with murder for shooting Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, this past Saturday.

  [NYT / Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo]

• Slager claimed he feared for his life and that Scott had taken his Taser; but a video taken by a bystander appears to show Slager using the Taser on Scott, and then dropping an object (it's not clear if it's the Taser) by Scott's body after shooting him.

• Slager handcuffed Scott after the shooting; as barbaric as that sounds, and looks on video, it's standard police procedure.

  [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

• Slager has been fired, with North Charleston police chief Eddie Driggers saying, "I have watched the video and I was sickened by what I saw."

  [NYT / Alan Blinder and Marc Santora]

• Prosecutions like this are very rare; in the past five years, South Carolina police have shot 209 people, 79 of whom died, and none of those cases have resulted in convictions for the officers involved.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Scott's father, Walter Scott Sr., lamented that his son's death would have been ignored absent video evidence: "It would have never come to light. They would have swept it under the rug, like they did with many others."

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• North Charleston is adopting body cameras for police in response to the shooting; preliminary evidence suggests body cams can reduce police use of force, but there are still major privacy concerns.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Scott's death was the 11th South Carolina police shooting this year.

  [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

• Robinson Meyer: even if body cams work, we still need bystanders, like the one in this case, who are brave enough to record police misconduct.

  [The Atlantic / Robinson Meyer]

3. No country for old war criminals

El Salvador's president, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, celebrates his 2014 victory. (Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images)

• The US has deported Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, a Salvadoran general and former defense minister who stands accused of numerous human rights violations in his country's 1980s civil war, to El Salvador.

  [NYT / Julia Preston]

• Last month, an appeals court found Vides complicit in the rape and murder of three American nuns working in El Salvador, and in the torture of political prisoners.

  [LA Times / Timothy Phelps]

• The Salvadoran government was an ally of the United States at the time, which feared a takeover by the leftist FMLN rebel group.

  [NYT / Julia Preston]

• Vides, who retired to Florida in 1989, received the Legion of Merit from President Reagan.

  [The Guardian / Rory Carroll]

• In many cases, such as the Salvadoran Army's massacre of over 800 civilians at El Mozote in 1981, the US knew of its allies crimes, but officials such as then–Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams publicly denied they occurred.

  [New Yorker / Mark Danner]

• Vides is "the first senior foreign military commander to face immigration charges brought by a special human rights office at the Department of Homeland Security."

  [The Guardian / Rory Carroll]

• Under a 1993 law passed in El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, combatants on both sides were granted broad amnesty, but it's not clear whether that covers all of Vides's crimes, and a prosecution is still possible.

  [NYT / Julia Preston]

• El Salvador's current president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, is a member of FMLN (now a peaceful political party), and fought as an FMLN guerrilla in the 1980s.

  [BBC]

4. Misc.

• Alex Abad-Santos answers the biggest question raised by Furious 7: can one, as The Rock does, flex a bicep hard enough to break an arm cast?

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

• Brains of children from poor families have up to 6 percent less surface area than brains of kids from rich families.

  [Practical Ethics / Chris Gyngell]

• The Verge's Apple Watch review is scarily comprehensive. The conclusion: "For all of its technological marvel, the Apple Watch is still a smartwatch, and it’s not clear that anyone’s yet figured out what smartwatches are actually for."

  [The Verge / Nilay Patel]

• This is the closest reading of two words Lena Dunham said that you will ever read. It is so much longer than two words.

  [New Yorker / Kathryn Schulz]

5. Verbatim

• "Abortion is killing a baby. But I'm not saying it's always wrong."

  [David King to Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• "A radical idea is that the bodies could perhaps be used as fertilizer for the Martians."

  [Slate / Daniel Oberhaus]

• "In a sense, Dr. Lauer said, we are nature’s random experiments."

  [NYT / Gina Kolata]

• "What if a bear just, like, walks off the elevator, strolls into the the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices, nods at the receptionist, then heads straight for Pete’s office and mauls him to death?"

  [Uproxx / Danger Guerrero]

• "We don't require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don't use their homes as brothels. … The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor."

  [Washington Post / Emily Badger]

• "Scientists can remind us that we’re unique among living beings in our capacity to deliberately abstain from reproduction; family historians can report in chilling detail the ways in which the mother-child bond is a fairly recent social construct — no matter. Our societal conviction that women are mothers foremost, people second, is so pervasive that the possibility of debunking it can seem its own kind of wish."

  [NYT / Kate Bolick]

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