Boston Marathon Bomber Tsarnaev Sentencing to Begin Monday

The penalty phase of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's trial will begin Monday, local press has reported.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Earlier in April, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty of all 30 charges, including murder and the use of a weapon of mass destruction. Seventeen charges carry the possibility of the death penalty.

On April 15, 2013, three people were killed and more than 250 injured after Tsarnaev, along with his elder brother Tamerlan, planted two pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police days after the bombing.

Tsarnaev's defense team will attempt to convince jurors to spare his life, explaining that, as a teenager, Dzhokhar was influenced by his radicalized brother, the Boston Globe said.

"They'll see him as a young boy," George Vien, a defense lawyer with Donnelly, Conroy & Gelhaar, was quoted as saying by the newspaper. During the trial the prosecution presented 17 witnesses, including victims of the blast, who spoke about how the bombings shattered their lives.

Prosecutors have called for a death sentence for the 21-year-old. Tsarnaev was born in the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan before immigrating to Russia and later to the United States.

Capital punishment was declared unconstitutional in the US state of Massachusetts, of which Boston is the capital, in 1984. Tsarnaev is being tried under federal law because of the gravity of his crimes.