The trial of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev resumes Thursday in a federal courthouse in Boston. 

Tsarnaev’s lawyer, Judy Clarke, admitted the 21-year-old Tsarnaev was involved in the deadly 2013 attack in her opening statement to the jury Wednesday.

“It was him,” Judy Clarke said of her client, who is facing the death penalty if convicted in the twin explosions at the finish line of the annual race that killed three people and injured another 264.

But she claimed that he was deeply influenced by his older brother, Tamerlan, to carry out the attack, which a prosecutor alleged was aimed at avenging U.S. wars in Muslim countries. By blaming the older brother, Clarke is hoping to convince the jury to not sentence the 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev inadvertently killed his brother, running over him with a car, as they attempted to elude police days after authorities had identified them as suspects in the bombings.

In his opening statement, U.S. prosecutor William Weinreb accused the younger Tsarnaev of detonating bombs designed to “tear people apart and create a bloody spectacle.”

Weinreb described the two homemade pressure cooker bombs used in the attack as the type “favored by terrorists” because of the mayhem and injuries they could cause. After the blasts, he said, “The air was filled with the smell of burning sulfur and people’s screams.”

Jurors also heard testimony from three survivors of the bombing who were severely wounded in the attack — two of whom each lost a leg. 

“My bones were literally laying next to me on the sidewalk,” said 27-year-old survivor Rebekah Gregory, who also suffered multiple shrapnel injuries to her arm. 

Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to the 30 counts against him, including the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer days after the bombings as the Tsarnaevs tried to flee.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his late brother are ethnic Chechens who had lived in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan and the volatile Dagestan region of Russia before coming to the U.S. with their parents and two sisters about a decade before the bombings.
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