Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s conviction by a federal court jury in Boston on all thirty counts he was facing comes as no surprise. I observed back in January that it is the “backwards nature of a capital case” that the determination of guilt or innocence tends to be “the least interesting aspect” of the proceedings. I tried to explain why:

When the death penalty is involved, … the jury also imposes the sentence, [which is] usually the task of the trial judge. A death-penalty case is thus a bifurcated trial, and it is the later sentencing phase that really matters.
The Justice Department authorizes capital prosecutions even more rarely than state prosecuting authorities do, and only when there is very convincing proof of guilt for a truly heinous offense. So there is apt to be little, if any, doubt that the defendant is guilty.

There can be some intrigue in the guilt phase of the case. It is not about guilt, though; it is about how the defense uses the guilt phase to tee up its presentation at the sentencing phase. My January column elaborated that in the guilt phase

the prosecutor can often expect help from defense counsel in establishing guilt. That is almost never the case in a normal trial, where the objective of the defense counsel is to undermine the government’s proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But in a death-penalty case, evidence that proves guilt can ironically help the defense convince the jury not to impose the death penalty — and in a capital case, defeating the death penalty is the main objective.
Jurors, for example, may be persuaded not to impose the death sentence if the defense can show that the accused was a low-level player in an atrocious enterprise — that he was intimidated by or under the Svengali spell of his superiors. It is anticipated that this is exactly what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will claim, i.e., the real driving force of the Boston Marathon mass-murder plot was his older brother, Tamerlan. The defense will portray Tamerlan as the real jihadist, a fierce figure whom Dzhokhar feared crossing and felt compelled to obey.
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Showing he was less culpable than his brother will not enable Dzhokhar to avoid a guilty verdict [because, as I relate in the column, it is no defense that a person who was not a captive was pressured by his coconspirator into committing crimes]. But it could help him avoid the death penalty. A capital sentence cannot be imposed unless the jury unanimously agrees to impose it during the sentencing phase of the case. The defendant needs to persuade only a single juror that he was such a weakling and so frightened by Tamerlan that he doesn’t deserve to be executed.

With that in mind, note this aspect of the Boston Globe’s reporting on the trial, cited in Patrick’s earlier post:

Both in opening statements in early March and in closing arguments earlier this week, Tsarnaev’s lawyers acknowledged that he took part in the crimes, though they sought to place blame on the older brother. They argued that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the one who radicalized his adolescent brother and pressured him into carrying out the attacks. The lawyers plan to flesh out that theory for jurors as they try to save him from the death penalty in the sentencing phase of the trial, which could take several weeks.

Again, the Tsarnaev strategy was, all but formally, to plead guilty to the indictment, rendering today’s verdicts a foregone conclusion. It was all about positioning for the sentencing phase – the real trial – which will now begin.