BOSTON—Defense lawyers trying to keep Dzhokhar Tsarnaev off death row opened their case Monday by telling jurors the convicted Boston Marathon bomber endured an unstable family life with mentally ill parents and a domineering older brother who couldn’t be disobeyed.
Defense attorney David Bruck also showed the jury stark photos of the federal “supermax” prison in Colorado, saying that if Mr. Tsarnaev is sentenced to life in prison, he would be forgotten there and spend the rest of his life in unrelenting punishment.
“No more spotlight like the death penalty brings. [His] legal case will be over for good and no martyrdom,” Mr. Bruck said.
The arguments represent a pivotal point in the high-profile trial. The defense presented few witnesses during the first phase, when Mr. Tsarnaev’s guilt was established, and declined to cross-examine most of the prosecution’s witnesses—many of them family members or victims with gripping, difficult stories.
For the first time, the defense has begun to try to explain in detail why a once-popular captain of his high-school wrestling team chose to plant a deadly bomb in a crowd at the marathon while his brother, Tamerlan, placed a second one nearby.
The younger brother was convicted on April 8 in connection with the attack, which killed three people and injured more than 260. He was also found guilty of the fatal shooting of a university police officer and a carjacking as he and his brother tried to flee the Boston area. Now 21 years old, Mr. Tsarnaev was 19 at the time of the April 2013 attack.
The same jury is weighing whether to sentence Mr. Tsarnaev to death or life in prison with no parole.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died four days after the bombing in a shootout with police.
“The man who conceived, planned and led this crime is dead. Only the 19-year-old younger brother who helped is left,” Mr. Bruck said.
Speaking in a soft voice, Mr. Bruck said the death penalty wouldn’t fill the depths of pain left by the bombing. “There is no point in trying to hurt him as he hurt because it can’t be done,” he said.
Prosecutors have argued that the siblings, Muslims of Chechen descent, were equally motivated by anti-U.S. jihadist propaganda that called for avenging Muslim deaths. Prosecutors said the younger Mr. Tsarnaev willingly joined his brother in waging terror against the U.S. by planting pressure-cooker bombs packed with nails, BBs and explosives at a crowded and celebrated sporting event.
Mr. Bruck painted a different portrait, using Mr. Tsarnaev’s Americanized nickname, Jahar, to describe a low-key young man in the grip of his older brother.
“Jahar did not defy Tamerlan to his face, not ever,” Mr. Bruck said.
The lawyer told the jury that there are probably people “who don’t want to hear what Jahar was like. That’s understandable.” He said that through all the family chaos, Mr. Tsarnaev was a quiet boy who watched his relatives’ children, was loved by teachers, and unlike his brother, didn’t assault other people.
In the coming days, the jury will hear from a host of witnesses, including those that will testify about the patriarchal culture of Chechen Muslims and the history of the Tsarnaev family.
After the family moved from Russia in 2002, Mr. Tsarnaev’s parents struggled to adjust, and both were diagnosed with serious mental illness, Mr. Bruck said. The parents returned to Russia in 2012, leaving Tamerlan as the man of the family and giving him undiluted influence on his brother, he said. Mr. Bruck repeatedly said he wasn’t trying to portray Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as being unable to control his own actions, but said his client had been raised to take direction from powerful males—and that he was a directionless teenager at the time of the attack.
“Jahar was 19. But he was still at an age at which many, many people make horribly bad self-destructive decisions,” Mr. Bruck said.
He said his client’s age as well as the other testimony the jury would hear “will show that as awful as this crime was, a lifetime in prison faced with what he has done is the better choice for everyone.”
Write to Jennifer Levitz at jennifer.levitz@wsj.com and Jon Kamp at jon.kamp@wsj.com
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