BOSTON BOMBING VERDICT: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Guilty on All 30 Counts in Boston Marathon Bombings … Now Jury Must Decide Whether He Gets Death Penalty or Life in Prison

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev found guilty on all counts …  GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been found guilty on all counts!!! It took the jury of seven women and five men 11½ hours of deliberations to reach their verdict, longer than it takes to run the Boston marathon. The convicted bomber never once looked at the jury as their verdicts were read. In the end, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty as sin for his crimes committed at the 2013 Boston Marathon and the ensuing acts that took place. As if that was ever in doubt. There was a mountain of evidence and some crimes are just so heinous that it is just a matter of the jury methodically going through the legal paperwork.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev VIDEO: The guilty counts, one-by-one

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his face a blank, stood with his head bowed and his hands clasped as the guilty verdicts tolled one after another for what seemed like an eternity: Guilty of using weapons of mass destruction, guilty of bombing a place of public use, guilty of conspiracy and aiding and abetting. Guilty, guilty, guilty: The word was spoken 32 times.Yes, the jury said, Tsarnaev caused the deaths of Krystle Campbell, Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu and Sean Collier. Yes, it was murder. And so, the word “yes” was spoken 63 times, each time making Tsarnaev eligible for the death penalty.

From start to finish, it took 26 minutes for the jury to announce its verdict in the Boston Marathon bombing trial: Tsarnaev didn’t skate on a single charge. He now stands guilty of all 30 counts, 17 of which could send him to death row.

If hearing the verdicts seemed overwhelming, that paled in comparison to seeing and hearing evidence behind them: awful images and sounds. The jury saw bombs explode and tear people apart. They saw streets splashed crimson with blood and littered with severed limbs and body parts. They heard the cries of the injured, and witnesses told them how people tended to the dying and gravely injured, unaware of their own injuries as they tied belts around the mangled limbs of friends and strangers alike.

UPDATE I: After bomber’s conviction, jury to decide life or death.

17 of the 30 counts that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty of on Wednesday are punishable by death. The question now becomes should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev rot in prison or rot in hell. Personally, I would choose Hell.

Now that a jury has convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on all charges, even more is at stake in the next phase of the federal trial: The same 12 people must decide whether the 21-year-old lives or dies.

Tsarnaev was found guilty Wednesday of 30 counts against him, including conspiracy and deadly use of a weapon of mass destruction. Seventeen of those charges are punishable by death.

“In a crime of this magnitude, what American citizen wouldn’t ask, `What would drive a person to do this?’ And, as a juror, the question becomes, what answer would satisfy you?”

During the penalty phase, which could begin as early as Monday, prosecutors will provide evidence of aggravating factors they believe support the death penalty. They’ve already listed several aggravating factors, including the killing of a child and the targeting of the marathon because of the potential for maximum bloodshed.

UPDATE II: Tsarnaev relative in Russia says she believes he’s innocent.

A U.S. jury found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of the Boston Marathon bombing, and his own lawyer admitted it in court, but a relative said Thursday that she remains convinced that he and his now-dead elder brother had no reason to carry out such a terrorist attack.

Tsarnaev was found guilty on Wednesday of all 30 counts against him, and now the same jury in Boston must decide whether he should be sentenced to death or to life in prison.

Roza Tsarnaeva, a 66-year-old cousin of Tsarnaev’s father, told The Associated Press in Chechnya that she is “completely convinced that they were not guilty of this.”

“When something happens the first thing you have to do is ask ‘who needs this?’ These boys didn’t need this,” she said. “They never saw war, they were little when they arrived in the U.S. and grew up there.

“No one in the Tsarnaev family, none of the relatives, ever took part in the military campaigns in Chechnya” in which separatists, some of them radical Islamists, fought two wars against Russian troops, she said.

Tsarnaeva claimed that the Boston bombing was “the doing of the American secret services, although with what aim I don’t know.”