Judy Clarke Has Saved Every American Villain. Until Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Along with the Boston Bomber, she has defended Ted Kaczynski, Zacarias Moussaoui, Eric Rudolph, and Susan Smith in court. By saving the worst among us, Clarke believes she's saving all of us. Whether we like it or not.

Boston Marathon Bombing defense lawyer
Gregory Bull

The day Ted Kaczynski realized he was capable of murder was the same day he showed up to his psychiatry appointment to talk about becoming a transsexual. He wanted a sex-change operation. His whole life, Ted Kaczynski was one of those guys who couldn't figure out how to connect with other people. He was awkward and insecure, and definitely a disaster with the women. But he longed to connect; he just couldn't figure out how to do it. And when he did try, in whatever way the Unabomber might, men and women alike rejected him. But as a transsexual—as a woman—the power dynamics might shift, or maybe his ability to connect to others would change. He didn't know, and wanted to talk to a psychiatrist about the desire. At the psychiatrist's office, he chickened out and left. On his way home, Kaczynski had an epiphany: He realized that he was capable of murder. And this murderous rage was directed toward the psychiatrist.

Later he retreated to a single-room cabin in Montana's Scapegoat Wilderness and started killing people with mail bombs.

Kaczynski never did meet anyone who lived up to his standards. "Imagine a grown man whose dream is to be an astronaut," he wrote of one victim, "his aspiration was so ignoble."

Then he was in an orange jumpsuit at the Sacramento County Jail on the way to death row, and in walks an attractive lawyer named Judy Clarke who wants to save him. She's towering and speaks with a slight drawl. Kaczynski was asked to "approve" of her. And he did. She lavished him with attention and spent eighty hours a week trying to get to know him and his case. Every day Judy Clarke appeared. She put her hand on his shoulder a lot in the courtroom.

In 1998 Kaczynski tried to explain his feelings in a letter to his pen pal, a psychologist and journalist named Gary Greenberg: "Those damn lawyers, Quin and Judy! I can't seem to get away from them. They make themselves indispensable to me through their willingness to perform essential services for me that no one else will perform. . . . And they're always so damned nice to me that I just can't stay mad at them, however much they deserve it. I don't know whether I've mentioned it before to you, but in spite of everything, I do have a strong personal attachment to Quin and Judy, and that's one of the reasons I can't seem to get rid of them."

This relationship with Judy Clarke may have been the first time the Unabomber felt the erotics of courtship. The who is chasing whom favored him.


Getty Images

At the federal courthouse in Boston, Judy Clarke is at the defense table with another shaggy-haired bomber. It's Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Bomber, and the room is packed with his victims. Clarke brings out a photo of Dzhokhar to show the jury. He's a kid, maybe twelve years old, with a mess of curly black hair and bright eyes, his older brother's arm draped around his shoulder. She has a second photo. It's the Dzhokhar we all know, wearing a backwards baseball cap, a goofy grin on his face, minutes before two homemade pressure-cooker bombs ripped through a crowd of people at the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three, permanently mutilating seventeen, and injuring 260.

"What took Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from this to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother with backpacks, walking down Boylston?" she asks the jury.

Dzhokhar, now twenty-one, shifts his weight from left to right. He twirls his hair. Two years ago, when he hid on a boat and scribbled messages on the walls about paradise, a bullet shot through one cheek and out the other. It messed up his jaw, fractured his skull.

Judy Clarke is sixty-two years old and has been a defense attorney for thirty-seven years. She's lanky but wide in the hips. She is rough and curt, but her tone is motherly. Her pallor is appropriate for her specialty—the death penalty.

Clarke has been the legal defender of almost every major American villain of the past twenty years, and never lost one to execution. These are people whose gross acts of murder and terror grow the largest in the public imagination. For many, as is the case with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, this particular kind of terror goes back to the photo, to the time when we disbelieved that this kind of transformation was possible.

People talk about "humanizing" defendants to save them from death. Actually, defendants are quite human enough already. Some lawyers prefer the word rehumanization. The task is to address the judge's, jurors', prosecutors', and public's perception of a defendant. The real story of any case is about events in the lives of human beings. We can't minimize the damage that they have done, but neither can we minimize the value of a person.


Susan Smith was the first famous client. Smith strapped her two kids into the backseat of a car and let it roll into a lake. She blamed everything on a black man. For nine days the world believed her fiction, and then she broke down and confessed. They say the kids would have sat in that car for five minutes in complete darkness before the water started to rise. They might have searched for their mother. She was just there with them—until she opened the door and jumped to shore.

There were others. Lisa Montgomery, who stole a woman's fetus. Shysty, the crack dealer who was put on trial with his identical twin. The Marine who said he didn't know about the human cargo in the back of his truck. The police officer with money problems. Joseph Duncan, who in May 2005 broke into a home in Idaho, bludgeoned a mother, her boyfriend, and a thirteen-year-old boy with a hammer, and grabbed a nine-year-old named Dylan and an eight-year-old named Shasta. He drove them to a remote campsite in the Montana wilderness. There he tortured and sodomized the boy and asked Shasta to watch while he blew Dylan's head off with a rifle.

Then the headliners. Eric Rudolph, lover of Christ, who bombed lesbian nightclubs, abortion clinics, the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. He published tirades on the Army of God Web site, which featured photos of aborted babies in buckets of formaldehyde. Ted Kaczyn-ski, the Unabomber, a lonely Harvard-educated mathematician who hated all things high-tech, including the jumbo jets that rumbled above his quiet wilderness in Montana. White supremacist Buford Furrow Jr., who shot up a Jewish center in Los Angeles in 1999. Jared Loughner, who shot nineteen people at a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Zacarias Moussaoui racked up the largest victim count. He took pilot lessons out in Minnesota so he could help fly planes into the Twin Towers. At his trial, the victims told stories like the one given by Lee Hanson, who was on the phone with his son as his plane crashed. "Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be quick." Then "Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" When the court presented a video of the tower's collapse, Moussaoui was smiling. He shuffled out of the courtroom with six life sentences singing Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." as "Burn in the U.S.A."


There's a story Judy Clarke once told a law-school commencement about hair and the O. J. Simpson trial, but it's really a caveat about the media. The story starts with the Susan Smith trial. David Bruck, who met Clarke in law school at the University of South Carolina, invited Clarke to join Smith's defense team in 1995. Clarke, who was a psychology major in college and at that point had focused mainly on representing small, petty criminals, refused—she didn't think she was good enough. But Bruck thought she was just the kind of person—in fact, the only person—who could connect with Smith.

The Smith case, which was a national news story, overlapped with O. J.'s trial, which was a global news story. It was a shitstorm, even involving Marcia Clark's hair, which itself garnered a mini fever of media attention. It was curly, lots of locks, Sigourney Weaveresque! And then one day a few weeks later, it was suddenly a much more professional and sullen bob.

a good hair day: prosecutor marcia clark sheds curls for a new look, declared an article in the Los Angeles Times. Clarke says it was that national debate, Curls versus Bob, that helped push her to decide not to speak with the media. She wanted to be known for her skills, not her hair or makeup. So when Barbara Walters called seeking an interview about Susan Smith, Clarke didn't find the time. She still hasn't.

After Clarke won Susan Smith a life sentence, she returned to her job as a public defender in Spokane and did agree to speak with her local paper, in one of her final interviews. The Smith trial was mega-news, and so you can imagine this homecoming. The sober-faced local public defender, now a national celebrity, coming back to her little office and little town. The maintenance guy at the office came up to her, Clarke told The Spokesman-Review. "Welcome back. It's really good to have you back," he said, and then added, "I think they should have killed her."

"People just didn't understand," Clarke said. "And maybe that's what we don't do as much as we should in death-penalty representation is make the person into one of us.


To know Judy Clarke is to know the stories of her clients. She learned the most from them; the clients Johnnie Cochran would call the "No J's," the folks charged with very ordinary crimes, or else those whose lives never made national news. They helped Clarke redefine what it means to win. It's never been a multimillion-dollar celebration or a toast to a guilty verdict, she told the commencement. Instead it's more like a thank-you note from the Supermax. Or a phone call from a client on the anniversary of an acquittal. Two decades of "No J's" taught her "human frailty and the constant reminder that there but for the grace of God go I."

Take John Lanny Lynch. He grew up in Las Vegas, and when he was in his twenties he moved into an apartment complex called Pirates Cove. It was here that Lynch started doing drugs with two Mafia guys named Lawrence Pizzichiello and Brian Carriero. One day the three of them went on a camping trip in the Montana wilderness. By the end of the camping trip, Carriero was dead in a barrel.

The way Pizzichiello remembered it, they were all taking a friendly stroll by the lake when Lynch pulled out a 9mm and shot Carriero in the head. Blood was all over the place, but Lynch shot him again to be sure. Then he robbed the corpse of his wallet and car keys. Later he took his shoes. Lynch pleaded with Pizzichiello to hide the body. They stuffed it in a burn barrel, lit it on fire, and let it burn. But it didn't burn everything, so they had to take rocks and make the bones small. They spread the ashes on the ground and buried the bigger chunks they couldn't splinter. Lynch's version is similar, except it's Pizzichiello doing the shooting.

The first time Judy Clarke gained his trust was during a phone call at the Hamilton Jail. Clarke was telling Lynch about Pizzichiello's plan to pin everything on him, and her words must have triggered something deep inside Lynch, because he buckled and fell to the floor. Clarke heard the thud. The guards didn't know Lynch had had a seizure until Clarke called them.

The day of his trial, Lynch was surprised by Clarke's demeanor in the courtroom—the Clarke he knew swore and wore jeans like everybody else. The prosecution brought in a cardboard box full of dirt and remains. It must have been sitting in the evidence room too long because the bottom broke and the remains spilled on the floor. Lynch didn't know what it was. He said hello to his mother in the front row, and the police marshal told him to quit it, and Lynch said Screw you, and Clarke wedged herself between the two men and explained to Lynch that Carriero's ashes were on the floor. Lynch felt another seizure coming on. The police swept up the remains in a dustpan and vacuumed the rest with a car-vac. The judge called for a lunch break.

When it was Lynch's turn to testify, he started to shake and sweat, and it got so bad that Clarke had to stop asking him questions. She told him to drink water, but he was having trouble pouring it, and so Clarke walked over and poured it for him. When they had first met, Clarke yelled at him a lot—the evidence was piling up and Lynch wouldn't admit he had done it. Clarke persisted. She spent months digging deep into every corner of his life—things like the way his parents spoke to him, the music he enjoyed, the women he'd slept with, thoughts he had when he stared blankly into the sky. And at the federal courthouse in Missoula, with the dust of Carriero's body still lingering on the floor, Clarke presented the full tapestry of Lynch's life and all the events that led him to that burn barrel.

The jury spared him death. Today, writing in an e-mail from the Lompoc federal prison in California, Lynch calls Clarke "motherly.


When Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, faced charges for crimes that carried with them the penalty of death, his younger brother, David, didn't have much hope for him. No one had ever related to Ted—that was his whole problem. Not a single person. Even in elementary school the other kids told him he was a freak. Maybe it was the pipe bomb he built in chemistry class. When David met his brother's defense attorney, Judy Clarke, in 1996, his feelings didn't change. He didn't think she could relate. Judy Clarke and Ted Kaczynski? He figured it would be like oil and water.

Kaczynski had been arrested in a single-room cabin in Montana where, for twenty-four years, he'd lived off the land and plotted the death of people working to advance technology. Nobody would have found him, at least not then, if The New York Times and The Washington Post hadn't decided to publish an excerpt of his manifesto—attributed to the then-anonymous Unabomber—about the deleterious effects of industrial society on the human race. David read the manifesto and recognized his brother in those words.

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race . . . they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities. . . . There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy."

David drove to his mother's apartment in Schenectady, New York, knocked on the door, and explained to Wanda Kaczynski that her older son was the Unabomber. Her face contorted in horror. The press surrounded David's home. For eight days he was alone with only the spectral images of Ted on television—now the Madman, the Terrorist. How must Ted feel knowing the only person in the world who was close to him had betrayed him? David Letterman called David the "Una-squealer." Others accused him of doing it for the money.

Clarke became David's only connection to his brother. She met with Ted essentially every day for two years, and would often call David soon after each visit to go over what she'd heard. David started to sense an emotional connection between his brother and Clarke. One day Clarke showed up with a drawing Ted had sketched during a meeting. It was a picture of a woman jogging. She'd told Ted that she loved to run. To David, that connection was a lot. That was huge.

In April of that year, the defense team flew Wanda to San Francisco to meet with a psychiatrist. When she returned home, David found her hunched and sobbing on the couch. David, I think they're going to blame me, she said. Am I responsible? Would only a horrible mother give birth to the Unabomber?

David called Clarke and asked if she would talk to his mother. She called right away, and as they spoke, David watched his mother transform, the pale husk replaced by vigor.

What did she say? David asked.

If I'm truthful, then nobody will be the villain and no one will be blamed, Clarke had told Wanda. I'm going to present this: Theodore Kaczynski the human being.


The bomb was the type designed "to tear people apart and create a bloody spectacle," the prosecution says. "The purpose of that type of bomb is to shred flesh, shatter bone, set people on fire, and cause its victims to die painful, bloody deaths and permanent disfigurement."

Officer Thomas Barrett says the whole thing felt like opening an oven. Officer Lauren Woods remembers clearing vomit from Lingzi Lu's lungs. Karen Rand McWatters says there was blood pouring out where her leg used to be. Another victim remembers seeing a foot with a sock on it and wondering, Did I wear a sock today? No. Good, so it was someone else's foot. When a man came to help, he picked her up, but she felt something loose. She thought maybe she was wearing strappy sandals, and she looked down, and it was actually her foot dangling. Shane O'Hara remembers a gunpowder smell and maybe a burned-hair smell, too.

Now the prosecution shows a video a man filmed before he was blown through the air. He remembers a mix of blood, gravel, shrapnel, sneakers, locks of blond hair, and thrashing. Maybe a mom and her daughter?

After the explosion, Rebekah Gregory was hoisted in the air and thrown back, and when she looked down, she couldn't find her leg. There were just bones lying next to her on the sidewalk and pools of blood and people's body parts all over. She lifted up her arms to grab her son, Noah, but the bones were coming out of her leg.

The defense has no questions.

At a break, some of the people in the bombing videos are outside. "It's a miracle they're all alive," someone whispers. "Almost like they have risen from the dead." When Jeff Bauman limps by on two prosthetic limbs, the hallway goes quiet. He isn't used to them yet and he has to wear shorts even in the winter because his pants trip him up.

After three weeks and ninety-two witnesses for the prosecution, it's Clarke's turn to present Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's case. There's no stream of witnesses. There are four, and the testimony lasts less than six hours. The testimonies focus on the role of Dzhokhar's older brother, twenty-six-year-old Tamerlan. The way his computer seemed to be the source of militant propaganda; how his fingerprints covered the bombs; how he was steps ahead of Dzhokhar at the Boston Marathon, scouting a place to drop the bomb.

During this first phase of the trial, the jury's decision is binary. Either Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty or not. Clarke conceded in her opening statement that Tsarnaev did it, because it's never about getting them off. It's about one thing: saving them from death.


Most days, the residents of Melvern, Kansas, thought thirty-six-year-old Lisa Montgomery was pregnant. They'd lost count of the number of miscarriages she claimed to have had. In one incident, she said she donated her lost fetus to science. Sometimes she prayed for a child with Reverend Wheatley at the First Church of God. Montgomery was on her second marriage, had four children from her first marriage, and had had her tubes tied.

In 2004, Montgomery started breeding rat terriers for money. She joined a Web site called Ratter Chatter to meet and chat with potential clients. But really she was looking for pregnant women. In the spring of that same year, she started a conversation with a twenty-three-year-old named Bobbie Jo Stinnett. During the conversation, like every conversation on Ratter Chatter, Montgomery mentioned that she was pregnant even though she was not pregnant. Bobby Jo Stinnett was eight months pregnant. Montgomery drove to Stinnett's, and when she arrived, Montgomery pounced on the pregnant woman, strangled her, and proceeded to perform a cesarean section on Stinnett (still alive) with a kitchen knife. Montgomery stuck her hand inside the torn womb and pulled out the baby. She left Stinnett on the floor to die, soaped up the baby, stuck her into a Winnie the Pooh onesie, and showed her off at the Whistle Stop Cafe in Melvern. No one in town thought much of it. Montgomery was always saying she was pregnant. The town seemed relieved it had finally happened. When Stinnett's mother came over to find her daughter that afternoon, she thought her stomach had simply exploded.

In October 2005, Clarke filed paperwork in federal court asking that she be added to Lisa Montgomery's defense team. The team already included federal defender David Owen, who had no death-penalty experience, and a local attorney named Susan Hunt, who did but had lost one client to death row. When Clarke showed up with several successful capital cases under her belt, including Ted Kaczynski, Hunt was relieved. At least someone on the defense team knew what they were doing.

Clarke had a system down for everything. There were many rules to follow. Everyone was required to visit the jail and attend the client-attorney meetings in pairs. They didn't wear fancy lawyer clothes or slide a tape recorder across the table. They just sat and talked, and it was never about the trial or the case. It was just about Montgomery's life and getting to know this life. They talked about daily routines. Kids. Husbands. They talked about dogs. Lisa had her rat terriers. Clarke had a schnauzer named Abe. Hunt had a few German shepherds. After each meeting, Clarke recommended everyone jot down their thoughts—anything that impressed them about the meetings. Clarke did this more than anyone—whatever had made an impression. They discussed these thoughts as a group. Then everyone was required to type up a one-page privileged client report. What was their experience of the meeting? The process was drawn out. It took months.

Montgomery was a very difficult client. But Clarke was gaining her trust. According to Hunt, Clarke believes that physical contact is sometimes the one gesture that can maintain the trust of a client. Maybe pat them on the back or offer a brief embrace. It's important, too, that the client isn't shackled, handcuffed, or sitting behind a barrier. The whole thing has to be like a coffee date with a friend. Except you're observing everything. When Montgomery spoke, Clarke listened not only to content but to affect, the way Montgomery said things and how her body moved.

One evening the defense team was having drinks at a local bar and grill when Owen handed Clarke a to-do list. According to Hunt, Clarke balked and told Owen he didn't have the skills to make a to-do list. She dissed him, told him to give up his position. He had no experience; she would be in charge. Owen never got over the meeting. Next thing you know U. S. district judge Gary Fenner removed Judy Clarke from the team. Three weeks later Hunt followed.

The trial began in October 2007. Hunt remembers how Montgomery sat at the defense table and was completely subdued, quiet, and cold. No emotion. They'd drugged her up, Hunt surmises. Clarke would never have done that. It was a huge mistake—you want the defendant to appear human, not like a cold-blooded killer.

In April 2008, the jury sentenced Lisa Montgomery to death. Three days before the verdict, David Owen called Susan Hunt. His voice was shaking. "Susan, you were so right," he said. "They never told her story. They should have told her story."


The narrative of someone's life does not exist for the taking. The client cannot tell you the story. Her family cannot tell you the story. A psychiatrist cannot tell you the story. You have to gather every story and understand them as representations. You must be so thorough as to be able to inhabit the mind of the killer and understand what brought him or her all the way from ordinary to doomed.

Until the 1980s, a client's story didn't play a role in federal death-penalty cases. People on death row were condemned to a slim version of themselves, defined only by the brutality of their crime. But to bring a pocket of grace to a murderer, you need a narrative.

On January 29, 1998, a bomb hidden beneath a shrub exploded at the New Woman All Women clinic in Birmingham. It was Eric Rudolph's fourth attempted mass killing since detonating a bomb outside the Summer Olympic Games in 1996. Not far away, Bill Bowen, the lawyer who would be asked to represent Rudolph, watched the smoke unfurl over his city.

When Judy Clarke arrived in Birmingham to join the defense team, she immediately revised Bowen's techniques. Bowen met with Rudolph once a week. "Sorry, this isn't enough," she told him. "We need to meet every day." And so Clarke and Bowen met Rudolph every day. They met on Christmas Day and they met on Thanksgiving Day. They met on days when conversations were slow because Rudolph sat in the corner of the room with down-turned eyes. Days when he was acting like a little shit. It's how it often began—with lies and a refusal to talk secrets.

But Clarke was also buoyed by a chain-smoking mitigation specialist named Scharlette Holdman, whom she'd worked with to develop Kaczynski's defense. Before becoming a hired gun for defense teams facing seemingly unwinnable cases, Holdman had spent a decade befriending, supporting, and finding lawyers for inmates on Florida's death row. While Clarke was drilling into Rudolph—"What songs do you love, Eric? What subjects did you like in school?"—Holdman was doing the same with every member of Rudolph's family and every friend and acquaintance she could find, learning about the abuse he experienced as a child, how his parents' education infected him.

Over the years, Clarke and Holdman have developed a simple technique: become a client's only hope, their last connection to the outside world, then use that relationship to mine every shred of personal information from a client that could be used to show what factors pushed them to transform from people into mass killers. The premise is that there is a spark of humanity in everyone that is ultimately more defining than whatever delusions, depression, and negative emotions culminated in the act of murder.

"If Judy had her choice, she would have Scharlette on every case," Bowen says. "These women are cut from the same bolt of cloth." And with the exception of Susan Smith, Holdman has served as a mitigator on nearly all of Judy Clarke's celebrity cases—Ted Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Jared Loughner, and now, according to one source, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. (If Scharlette Holdman's on a case, it's usually not on public record at the time.)

At the start of Jared Loughner's investigation, Judy Clarke requested subpoenas for the public-health records of two dozen of Loughner's relatives on his mother's side from as far back as 1893, the year Loughner's maternal great-grandmother was born, and then dispatched Holdman to Judy Wackt's home in Fort Worth, Texas. Wackt is the first cousin of Jared Loughner's mother. Wackt said her oldest aunt suffered from bipolar disorder and was hospitalized for it. The aunt had been healthy for years, and then slipped into a depression.

For Ted Kaczynski, while Clarke was digging deep into Ted's childhood with the help of David and his mother, Wanda, Holdman recruited a team of younger people to learn her trade. She taught them how to research Kaczynski's background in order to retrace the steps that led him to murder. One young woman was dispatched to a remote mountain lake in Montana where Ted and David Kaczynski had once camped, and to other places that had been dear to Ted. He had called them his "sacred places."

In 2006, Clarke and Holdman taught a seminar on capital defense for the California Public Defenders Association called "The Team Includes Your Client." In the seminar, they listed interview techniques such as "Look for central repeating themes and metaphors in the client's life," "Listen to what lies beneath the client's symptoms," and "Listen to affect rather than content." Their interest lies in the things not said, the silence between sentences, the tiny, often unseen currents that direct a life.

And at the attorney meetings, if Clarke and Holdman found disagreements in how each attorney perceived a defendant's story, they didn't try to resolve these per se but might use these rifts as a kind of opening or gateway toward individualization. What appears to be the most opposed might in fact be the most intimately connected. It's F. Scott Fitzgerald's idea that intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time. That's what Clarke asks juries to do. These are perverse characters capable of loving acts.

Rudolph eventually took a plea deal two weeks before trial in which he agreed to tell the FBI everything he knew about other extremist plots in return for life in prison. But Bowen had already come to care for Eric Rudolph. He says that he knew Clarke must have been leading him there, to this straddling point, where on the one hand there's a life on the line, and on the other hand there's the horror this life has perpetrated.

That's what this was about—learning to love people who did terrible things.


Some former clients feel contentious toward Clarke. Tanh Huu Lam, a Vietnamese accused of murder, writes that Clarke didn't ask him any personal questions, just watched family videos. "She was a very suave lady." But "Ms. Clarke just worried about the reputation of federal defenders." John Lanny Lynch writes, "I'm not sure I can say I ever bonded with Judy." She used to send him postcards from her vacations around the world. But he isn't happy, and he doesn't think she did enough. "My impression is that her life mission is to abolish the death penalty." Lynch told Clarke he sometimes supported the death penalty. She gave him a curious look.

Others clients simply wish to die.

Tsarnaev wrote it on the boat he hid in for sixteen hours before his capture: "I ask Allah to make me a shahied to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven." Moussaoui begged for a new trial after the jury sentenced him to six life sentences in the Supermax, because he wanted to be executed. Ted Kaczynski tried to commit suicide to escape life and Clarke's strategy. He was not interested in a life sentence if it meant an insanity defense, and that's exactly what Clarke planned to pre-sent. The idea humiliated Kaczynski. His work—the philosophical purity and importance of it—would be reduced to nothing but the ramblings of a "sickie." But Clarke was single-minded. Kaczynski was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic—or a "borderline" schizophrenic (the legitimacy of the diagnosis is still under debate)—and this secured him a life sentence in the Supermax. Clarke saved his life at the expense of his dignity. Kaczynski was furious, and remains so.

Clarke's role as a lawyer is to put her clients' wishes and needs ahead of her own agenda. Kaczynski didn't see it happen this way. In the end, she betrayed him, in the same way he felt his brother David had betrayed him when he made the anguished decision to call the FBI.


If anyone knows who Judy Clarke is, they generally assume that she takes on these clients because she is unalterably opposed to the death penalty for its immorality. In actuality, it seems so much more complicated and interesting than that.

Clarke was raised in a conservative family, her mother, Patsy, wrote in a memoir. Not libertarian, let-us-keep-our-money conservative. But capital-C conservative. It was church every Sunday, God before country, Jesse Helms conservative. In fact, Jesse Helms, best known for saying things like AIDS is caused by "gay men's deliberate, disgusting, and revolting conduct," was a fixture in her family for a time. Clarke's father worked closely with Helms before he died in a plane crash in 1987. The family mourned their father, but it hit Clarke's brother Mark especially hard. Mark was gay and deeply closeted. And now with his father dead and in an all-knowing place, Mark believed he would know his darkest secret. "My dad's dead," Mark told his sisters. "Now he knows all about me. And he hates me."

Soon Jesse Helms would know as well, because Mark would fall ill and die of AIDS in 1994. It took him a year to die and the family watched his body deteriorate. The day before his death, Clarke told her mother, Patsy: "He looked so much better. Really, it's not going to happen yet." Here's what family friend Jesse Helms told Patsy Clarke after Mark's death: "I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activity."

There are moments that define a life. They are the lens through which a person sees the world. And if you were with Judy and Patsy back in 1995, you might have seen the gestation of a worldview. You would have seen Judy tell her mother that what Helms said was wrong. That Mark was much more than his AIDS or his sexuality, and that he deserved more. That Mark having AIDS wasn't a "disgrace" but a "tragedy." You would have seen Judy and her mother not just being angry but channeling that anger, fighting. You'd see them fundraise and form a group to remove Helms from office. You would see them fighting for the person they knew—not a disgusting pervert or an AIDS case.

And if you stuck around, a month later you would have seen Judy step before the jury at the Union County courthouse and ask them to keep their hearts open about another person with a history of demons and dark secrets: Susan Smith, who drowned her children.


In death-penalty cases, the jury is asked to make a "reasoned moral response" to evidence about the offense and the offender. In federal law, the process involves "weighing" aggravating and mitigating factors. Each juror is permitted to give any mitigating factor whatever weight that juror thinks it deserves. Jurors don't need to come to agreement about what is mitigating and what the mitigators are "worth." A single juror can prevent the unanimous verdict that is necessary to authorize the death penalty.

Now the odd thing: This "reasoned moral response" is given by jurors who already said they were willing to vote for death. Anyone against the death penalty is excluded.

Clarke's task is to create "reasoned moral response." It's not just a recitation of trauma but something more comparable to the work of a novelist. In Paradise Lost, the Devil is the most interesting character, famously. It's thought that Dostoyevsky's best work rose from a polemic waged against the hollow characters of Gogol, whose shells he stole and reinhabited from within, allowing the reader to get close enough so that when murder happens, we sympathize, not with the crime, but with the anguish of the character who committed it.

Before the surviving victims speak during the penalty phase of Tsarnaev's trial, after which the jury will decide life or death, the prosecution lines up a row of photos before the jury. Lingzi Lu, age twenty-three, is on the left. She has a perpetual smile, as does eight-year-old Martin Richard.* On the right, twenty-seven-year-old Sean Collier looks sharp in a good suit, and Krystle Campbell, aged twenty-nine, shows off a white dress. In the middle, between them all, is a lone easel with a black cloth over the top.

The prosecutor is a woman in a purple blazer and white scarf. How terrorism originates, its lineage, doesn't matter, Nadine Pellegrini says. "What matters is that terrorism sang to him!" And here she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be," before adding her one twist: "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was destined to be America's worst nightmare." Then comes the reveal: a closed-circuit photo of Tsarnaev in a courtroom holding cell staring up at a security camera, giving it the middle finger. She calls this Tsarnaev's "message to America."

The average closed-circuit security camera captures thirty frames per second. That single image of Tsarnaev was one of hundreds, thousands of frames that together made up the short film of his life in the holding cell. When Clarke's team shows the jury the rest of the video, the images surrounding that single photo show Tsarnaev fixing his hair and making peace signs with his fingers. What becomes clear once Clarke's team takes the floor is that the camera that recorded that video was encased in a mirror. He might have been giving the finger to his own reflection, to himself.

Clarke humanizes the client, but more important, she humanizes the jury. She humanized residents of Union, South Carolina, after the Susan Smith trial. "She was one of them," Clarke said. "She was always going to be one of them, and she made a terribly, terribly bad choice. How are you going to kill her?" Nearly three thousand Americans were killed in the attacks of 9/11, and then hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians were killed next. And we are reminded that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev planted the bombs in retaliation for American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clarke traces evil directly back to itself. It's childhood trauma, molestation, unrequited love. It's a closed loop. And the death penalty acts as a kind of mirror of society, an America trapped in cycles of vengeance. And so if Ted Kaczynski wants to die, Clarke won't let it happen, because when it comes to death, humanity as an abstraction supersedes the needs of individuals.

Toward the end of the Susan Smith trial, Clarke's team referenced the death of Jesus Christ and offered each member of the jury a stone to throw. "The law does not tell you what to do," Bruck, her cocounsel, told the jury. "It doesn't even give you much of a hint. It leaves it up to you."

Because with that stone, the jury becomes the murderer.


David Kaczynski works at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery near Woodstock, New York. He travels sometimes to his cabin in Texas, the same cabin he built fifteen years after his older brother, Ted Kaczynski, built his own cabin in the woods of Montana. The day we spoke there was a man scheduled for execution in Texas, a long-time schizophrenic with multiple hospitalizations who exercised his right to serve as his own attorney. "Judy was a lifesaver for our family," he said. "When I think of Judy, I think of people like him, those who are no longer living because of the death penalty, including Jesus Christ."

When the defense team flew David Kaczynski to Sacramento, California, they asked him to read twenty thousand pages of his brother's diaries. Clarke wanted a reality check on Ted's perceptions. David holed up in a hotel room and read eighteen hours a day. It took him a week to finish, and as he made his way through the diaries, a window opened into Ted's psyche. There were no monsters coming out of the sky—all his thoughts were oriented toward conventional reality—but this reality had a dark filter over it. David didn't realize how deeply his brother had suffered from loneliness and from a feeling of being unloved. He really just wanted a girlfriend.


David King, a military combat surgeon, says eight-year-old Martin Richard did not die instantly but suffered "a much more primal, very disturbing kind of pain."

The bomb blast knocked Gillian Reny like a softball into her mother. They fell as the smoke settled around them. Reny's tibia snapped in two. Her left leg was torn apart and a piece of muscle flapped over her shredded jeans. Then this army guy showed up and he was trying to get her off the sidewalk.

The prosecution pauses the testimony to play a video. It's from a camera a man was using to film the runners until he went flying. People keep knocking the camera, moving it around—it's hard to say—but the angle is shifting.

There are wails, small phrases of want—I can't I can't—a single drawn-out scream. Blue sky, bones in wet muscle, and there's Reny's blond hair stiff as a plant in need of water. The camera rolls again and BBs expelled from one of the bombs steam like rabbit shit in a pool of blood.

The witness, Reny, shakily lifts a cup of water to her mouth. She wipes her eyes until the mascara darkens her skin and makes her blue eyes pop.

The defense acknowledges that the punishment could never be equal to the terrible effects of this crime. "There is no evening of the scales," Bruck says. The story isn't an excuse; the story is the only way to fight off another death.

It begins with a story of exile, when the Tsarnaev family, generations back—long before either brother was born—was banished by Soviets from their homeland in the northern Caucasus and made their way, along with thousands of minorities, across Russia and Central Asia. On a map they show the routes of suffering the family traveled, until they shift to another much more complicated map of an individual's life, and they keep going, Clarke at Dzhokhar's side, until Tamerlan has images of dead children on his laptop, and until the dead children are real.

Published in the June/July 2015 issue.

* We have updated this article to reflect the correct name of bombing victim Martin Richard. We sincerely regret the error.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below