Sparks flew in a federal courtroom in Boston on Tuesday in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – the younger and only survivor of two brothers accused of perpetrating the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing – as the testimony of an FBI agent and witness for the prosecution collapsed under cross-examination by the defence.
Tsarnaev’s defence attorney Miriam Conrad surgically deconstructed testimony given late on Monday by an FBI agent that looked at Tsarnaev’s Twitter accounts – and embarrassed the FBI by showing them to have misidentified a picture of a mosque in Grozny, Chechnya, as the Muslim holy site of Mecca.
On Monday, FBI special agent Steven Kimball showed the court the front page of a second Twitter account that he alleged also belonged to Tsarnaev, and read out tweets from his separate personal account that played into the prosecution’s picture of Tsarnaev as a callous, radicalised killer.
On Tuesday, when Conrad placed those tweets in context, much of Kimball’s testimony was made to look like the result of cynically selective representation by the prosecution.
“You said the picture [that forms the background of the second account] was a picture of Mecca,” said Conrad, towards the end of a lengthy and tense cross-examination.
“Yes, to the best of my knowledge,” answered Kimball.
“Did you bother to look at a picture of Mecca?” Conrad shot back.
“No.”
“Would it surprise you to learn that it is a picture of Grozny?”
The picture on the account is not of Mecca – the FBI had misidentified it. It is in fact a picture of the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque in Grozny.
The exposure of that mistake was just part of a long morning of embarrassment for the FBI, as Conrad poked gaping holes in their investigation into Tsarnaev’s online persona.
Kimball was forced to admit that he did not know that several of the tweets the prosecution had highlighted yesterday – to damning effect – as pointing towards Tsarnaev’s radicalisation and violence were actually lyrics from pop songs.
This included perhaps the most damning tweet of all those shown by the prosecution, which read, in Cyrillic: “I shall die young.”
Moreover, it became clear through Conrad’s questioning that Kimball had made little effort to discover the context of the tweets; he admitted at one point that he had not even clicked on some of the links they contained. One of the links was to the Russian pop song that contained the “I shall die young” lyric.
Other posts shown by Kimball yesterday turned out to be jokes from the Comedy Central television show Tosh.o, or sketch comedy duo Key and Peele.
At one point, Kimball misidentified a quote as having been made by the radical al -Qaida-affiliated cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. It was actually a quote from the Qu’ran.
In a savage cross-examination, Conrad painted Kimball as a prosecution shill. “You were just given the ones that the government wanted to show to the jury?” she asked.
“Yes,” Kimball said.
“… and you had no part in selecting them?”
“Very little,” answered Kimball, adding that the prosecution team had been the ones to decide which tweets to present to the jury.
Conrad asked about another tweet that was highlighted in Kimball’s testimony, in which Tsarnaev referred to a story about a man crying at the Boston Marathon as being fake.
“Did you know it actually is a fake story?” asked Conrad.
“No,” answered Kimball.
Conrad also took Kimball to task for his lack of understanding of much of the slang Tsarnaev used in his tweets.
“Do you know what ‘mad cooked’ means?” Kimball fidgeted, and tried to guess. “Crazy?”
“It means high,” said Conrad. “Do you know who Key and Peele are?”
“No.”
Key and Peele are the lead performers of a Comedy Central sketch show.
The only slang Kimball did manage to successfully identify was “LOL” for “laugh out loud”.
In her opening statement, Judy Clarke, the lead lawyer for Tsarnaev’s defence, told the jury that the defence were not contesting the basic facts of her client’s involvement in the bombing, despite his not-guilty plea.
The cross-examination of Kimball does not change that – but it will act to undermine the prosecution’s ability to paint the picture of Tsarnaev that they want to paint.
The underlying meaning of the first phase of this trial is, Clarke’s opening statement made clear, not to exonerate Tsarnaev completely of the 30 charges against him, but to win the jury’s trust for the second, death-penalty phase, when they will hear arguments as to whether to sentence Tsarnaev to die.
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