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Jury Selection in Tsarnaev Case Under Way; Crash of AirAsia Flight 8501; Dow Down More Than 200 Points

Aired January 05, 2015 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: He looks around. He made eye contact with a number of the jurors it appeared. He also played with his beard and just was aware of what was going on around him. The judge informing all the people who were sitting there that this is indeed the beginning of the trial.

ANA CABRERA, CNN ANCHOR: Unfortunately we are having technical difficulties but, again, repeating what she said. The headline there is jury selection is under way. 1,200-some summonses and we will get more from her on what's happening in the courtroom as the day proceeds.

But let's talk more about the start of this trial, CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem is joining me. Juliette, the defense characterizes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an impressionable teenager who was manipulated by his older brother who eventually was killed by police.

Now the mountain of evidence from prosecutors include writings from the both where Dzhokhar was captured. And I want to read them to you. I quote, "We Muslims are one body. You hurt one, you hurt us all." He also goes on to say now, "I don't like killing innocent people. It is forbidden in Islam but due to" something that's ineligible, the next part we just couldn't understand. But he says it is allowed. And another statement read "Stop killing innocent people and we will stop." And then finally this, the U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians."

Some words that seem pretty incriminating especially when he goes on to say "I can't stand to see such evil go unpunished." Juliette -- in light of all of these writings, just those alone, will the defense's strategy hold up in saying that his brother is the one to blame?

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: It may -- it very well may and the reason why is we need to stop thinking about this as a terrorism case at this stage. It's now a death penalty case. His motives matter less because they have a very strong guilty case against him.

What everyone is focusing on is he going to get the death penalty or not? So a lot of these discussions about was he impressionable or was he evil in and of himself, really had nothing to do with guilt or innocence. They're going to have to do with whether he spends the rest of his life in jail or the death penalty.

And that's the process that's really going on with this jury pool right now. Is it really has more to do with are these jurors going to be willing, do they believe in the death penalty or are they opposed to it? And so one way to look at this is just take the terrorism out of it, this is really about just the death penalty. And almost all the lawyers in the case are focused on that right now.

CABRERA: What do you think about having the death penalty still in play in this case? And Attorney General Eric Holder who has been a critic of the death penalty kind of backing up this position?

KAYYEM: I thought when the Attorney General decided to allow the death penalty to go forward I thought that that was a smart tactic to try to get this case to plea out. In other words, you get him to say what he knows, talk about the relationship he had with his brother and then he would just get life in jail.

So I have been as surprised as anyone that this has gotten to this stage; that the U.S. may be unwilling to settle or to take the death penalty off the table. I am personally opposed to the death penalty so my feelings about that are -- having to do with my own personal opposition to it, but I really thought that was a strategy by the U.S. government to get this to plea. So I'm surprised we've gotten to this stage.

CABRERA: I also want to bring in "Boston Globe" columnist Kevin Cullen. Kevin, I know a change of venue has been denied by this judge over and over again. He has disagreed with the defense's argument that the jury pool in the Boston area cannot be impartial.

But you recently wrote about this. I know you said that the defense's reasons for moving the trial just didn't add up. Explain what you mean.

KEVIN CULLEN, "BOSTON GLOBE": Well, my argument is that I've not been convinced by what the defense has suggested that we can not use the voir dire process that began today to weed out potential bias among jurors. The defense has contended that all five million people who live in the eastern Massachusetts were victims in this case and I think that really stretches it.

I think it's also insulting to the memory of the people who were killed and also to the victims, real victim, people who were injured and traumatized that day. I don't mean to minimize how difficult it will be to get an impartial jury given the extensive publicity here.

That said that's why the voir dire process exists and there are 1, 200 people in this pool. What you were talking about previously, Ana, I think is even a bigger issue because if you take by extrapolation that more than half of the people that live in this area oppose the death penalty, they're in the courtroom right now checking off that they can not impose the death penalty; that they can't sit in a case. So that's going to shrink the potential jury pool considerably.

Now, there is a caveat. If you look at what Judge O'Toole wrote in his orders, he has said if the voir dire process does not work, if they find it too difficult to empanel what he considers an impartial jury, he's open to the idea of a postponement and/or a change of venue.

CABRERA: So in essence things aren't over yet. It's not settled that this is going to happen in Boston, that's the reaction we're moving, but it could change as the jury process continues to unfold.

I know Juliette, as a candidate for Massachusetts governor a few years ago, you said the death penalty should not be pursued in this case and that caught my ear. Why is that?

KAYYEM: Well, I mean, all of it is personal. All the Democratic candidates were very consistent with where this state is, which is against -- majority of people are against the death penalty. In this case I thought let's just find out, prove either innocence or guilt and that you take the death penalty off the table. That's just a personal feeling.

But my good friend Kevin makes a good point about the change of venue argument. Everyone realizes that there's both the trial case going on and appeals going on simultaneously. So if there's a lot going on with this case right now. The appeals are related to both the change of venue and some of the other sort of smaller motions that are heading their way to the court of appeals.

So there's going to be a lot of sort of technical issues that are resolved as well as the big issue which is change of venue. Having been at the department of Justice during the Oklahoma City bombings, while I understand where Kevin is coming from on the change of venue arguments and it may be that we get to that point, Oklahoma City is a pretty strong argument for moving the venue away from Boston. Oklahoma City -- that trial did not take place in Oklahoma City for the same reasons.

CABRERA: Kevin, do you agree?

BULLEN: Well, the defense has used that in their filings. They've cited Oklahoma City as an example. I actually talked to Steven Jones, who represented Timothy McVeigh who was convicted, obviously, of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He have thinks it's rather ludicrous to compare the community-wide trauma here after the marathon bombings to what happened in Oklahoma City.

You don't want to actually keep a death count but let's face it, three people were killed in Boston, 17 people lost their legs and more than 200 were injured. In Oklahoma City, 168 people were killed and 19 of them were children. The extensive damage to buildings, there were more than 300 buildings damaged or totally destroyed in the Oklahoma City bombing and it was impossible, Jones said, to find anybody that wasn't touched by it.

I can only tell you my experience here. I have a lot of friends who don't follow this case. They saw what was on TV but I think we in our business and they in their legal business seem to think everybody follows this as closely as we do. I can just tell you by experience, that's just not true. And I don't think it's -- I don't think just by the fact that you saw television coverage or read the newspaper about what happened after the Boston Marathon, you know, rules you out as a potential juror. I don't accept that.

Put it this way, they need to go through this voir dire process and if they have such problems getting a jury I think you will see a change of venue. But I think this is the first step.

CABRERA: Kevin, very, very quickly --

KAYYEM: I agree with that -- yes.

CABRERA: Kevin, I want to ask you, though, in terms of the victims, I know you've been covering this so intensely. Do the victims agree about keeping the death penalty on the table?

CULLEN: You know, I always say you would have to ask victims about that. I don't think there's a consensus among victims. My newspaper yesterday ran a series of vignettes of different victims and just by that measure, that anecdotal measure, people were divided. Some were in favor of the death penalty, some were not. And I think that's probably typical of the people that are sitting right now in this courtroom being judged as potential jurors. I think they're very divided on it.

CABRERA: All right. Kevin Cullen, Juliette Kayyem -- thanks to both of you. We appreciate it.

We're back in a minute.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: A new theory is emerging as to what may have downed Flight 8501. Indonesian weather experts are now pointing to possible icing- related engine problems as one explanation. It's all outlined in a new 14-page government report that looked at weather conditions on the day the plane crashed into the Java Sea.

Let's talk more about this with CNN meteorologist Chad Myers and former pilot Alastair Rosenschein -- he's joining me by phone from England. But, Chad, let's start with you. We know it was stormy on the day of this crash but how would you explain icing inside the jet engines?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLORIST: You know, Ana, I think you can almost stop where you just started right there since all we know truly, truly, the fact we know is that it was stormy that day. The rest from where we go from here is just someone's opinion and you know what they mean.

So here we go. This is where the plane was -- 32,000 feet, flying at about 30 degrees below zero. As the plane was flying either through or around thunderstorms in the area that day we know some of these storms were 50,000 feet tall, the pilot would not try to go through that storm because of the updrafts.

But we also know that the plane violently rose, at least from some of the radar data that we've seen, it rose at least something here to a point where the plane couldn't do it on its own. There had to be some type of updraft going on. Some type of updraft pushing that plane up. And in an updraft, sometimes the dew point of the clouds pushing the plane up can be higher than the temperature of the plane and that can cause on a summer day -- that can cause your iced tea to get condensation on your spring break, you know that in Florida, or it also can cause a rapid formation of rime ice on the airplane. That's all we know.

All of these things are could, could, could; and where they got that A + B equals C from, I'm still not sure. Maybe we could talk to Alastair about it.

CABRERA: Yes, let's turn to Alastair for that. You have 30 years of flying experience in the aviation industry -- nearly 15,000 flying hours. Is it likely that icing could have led to the plane's downfall?

ALASTAIR ROSENSCHEIN, FORMER PILOT (via telephone): Well, icing is indeed one of the major dangers of flying inside a thunderstorm. And as your meteorologist pointed out, the aircraft can pass through layers in the atmosphere in those clouds where you can pick up icing. It can affect you two ways. One, it can impact on the engines but -- forming ice on the air intake. It can also form ice on the flying surface, the leading edge of the wing and tail and the aerodynamics and even the weight of ice can prevent the aircraft from flying normally.

It doesn't need a great deal of disturbance to the aircraft in terms of ice buildup for the aircraft to reach the stall speed at those altitudes. So icing is indeed a possible factor. But, of course, we don't know why the plane came down. These are some of the dangers in thunderstorms.

Can I also say that the heavy weight of water, the ingestion of the water into the engines can, in fact, cause the engines to flame out? But you know that would not in itself cause an act of this nature. It's more likely that the aircraft in some way, the pilots lost control of the aircraft and it may have entered some form of aerodynamic instability from which they never recovered.

CABRERA: If it were icing that caused that instability, would pilots have been alerted from some kind of a censoring system and how much time would they have to react to try to fix that?

Well, let me say, I have actually flown inadvertently through a couple of thunderstorms in my time and you do get an instant -- you can and I have had an instant buildup of icing on the wind screen. It's very, very obvious that you're getting an icing event.

But there's also the fact that there isn't a great deal they can do about it at that stage except for putting on igniters on the engines to prevent the engines from icing up and change their level. But, you know, inside -- when you enter one of these thunderstorms, the aircraft is being shaken about very violently with a great deal of noise and that can be from hail or just wind noise. There are G- forces acting on the aircraft. All of that is very disorientating and the main thing the pilots will try and focus on is flying the aircraft, keeping it level and keeping its speed within certain parameters. So it all happens very suddenly, very quickly and, you know, it can be different factors within the thunderstorm that can cause an aircraft to -- well, basically to crash.

CABRERA: All of these are theories at this point until we have more information and hopefully find those black boxes. Chad Myers and Alastair Rosenschein -- thanks to both of you. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: Welcome back.

The search for AirAsia Flight 8501 has finished for the day, cut short again because of weather but divers still have not found those very crucial black boxes that could explain what caused the crash and why. And experts say tracing their pings is a little like finding a needle in a haystack. CNN's Miguel Marquez has more.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The search for AirAsia Flight 8501 narrowing -- the hunt on for a tiny signal in a turbulent sea. Minute pings from a device attached to the flight data recorder.

A pinger has a specific pulse. It comes at a specific interval and it has specific frequency.

PAUL GINSBERG, FORENSIC AUDIO EXPERT: Correct.

MARQUEZ: But it's still hard to find?

GINSBERG: Yes. It is.

MARQUEZ: Forensic audio expert Paul Ginsberg has simulated what a pinger would sound like undistorted and without any competing sounds. But, says Ginsberg, there is plenty competing for attention at the bottom of the sea.

GINSBERG: A school of fish swimming, currents, echoes from the signal bouncing off different rock formations at the bottom.

MARQUEZ: This signal, he says, is what an experienced operator might initially hear.

GINSBERG: Just as when you're listening to a radio station that's out of your range.

MARQUEZ: Ginsberg says because the pings come at regular intervals and at a known frequency, once they have it, an experienced audio technician can clean it up to hear this.

We asked Ginsberg to show us how it's done. We want to put you to the test. We'll record ourselves on this while this very annoying tone is playing. When he plays it back, here's what he has to work with.

GINSBERG: In this case I will attempt to get rid of this tone.

MARQUEZ: Ginsberg analyzes the recording spectrum, sees the offending tone, and using his own software is able to zero in on it and remove the excess noise.

GINSBERG: In this case, I will attempt to get rid of this tone.

MARQUEZ: This job, easy -- one noise and he knew just what it was and where it was coming from cutting through the many noises and distortions in the Java Sea is now the consuming mission of search crews on scene.

Miguel Marquez, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CABRERA: Still to come, breaking news, the Dow down more than 200 points -- 207 right now. Christine Romans will join us live with what's pulling the market down now.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: We are following breaking news in the market this is morning -- the Dow plummeting more than 200 points down this morning. CNN's chief business correspondent Christine Romans is joining me now with the latest. We saw it down 100 an hour ago and now 205.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: That's over 1 percent when you think of how far we've come over the past two years, you can see that this morning they're taking some off the table. The reason is commodities, frankly. Oil prices at a five-and-a-half year low, about $50 a barrel. Think of that.

Anna, look at that chart, that is the decline in crude oil prices since this summer and that is taken gasoline prices down with it. That's been great for you and me. It's been great for drivers. $2.20 is the price per gallon right and it's expected to stay in the zone, maybe even all year.

But it's terrible news for companies that are in the oil industry. So you can see that in the oil industry all those oil stocks are falling today. Commodity-related stocks are falling, other commodity, metal stocks are falling. And one of the reasons for that is because you've got the dollar up against the euro so that's been hammering some of the commodities and now you have stocks falling here as well.

So a lot happening, roiling international markets with the dollar at a nine-year-high against the euro with oil prices at a five-and-a-half- year low and, really, after a very good end of the year for stocks a lot of people selling in the market. I say a lot, so you look at that number, a one percent move is not considered remarkable -- believe it or not. We have come so far that a 200-point move is just 1 percent. When you start to see moves of 3 percent to 5 percent, that's when you really start to get worried.

50 stocks are up but 450 are down when you look at the S&P 500 -- the 500 stocks that make up the S&P, about 450 of them are lower today. So that tells you it's pretty broad-based the selling.

CABRERA: So those investors, especially those who are looking at retirement in the near future, just hang on tight.

ROMANS: Hang on. One move in the market isn't something that should get you too nervous. However, at the beginning of the year, always very good to know how long you have until retirement, how much of your portfolio is in the stock market. Make sure you have the right mix of stocks, bonds, cash and other real estate and other investments that you can sleep at night, that's something you want to always -- every quarter, every six months you should make sure you take a look at that.

CABRERA: And when you said oil prices could be down for a while, makes you wonder how low it's going to go.

ROMANS: It's great news for consumers, it's great news. Especially for the paycheck to paycheck consumer, this feels like a tax cut for them. So you really want to focus on the good part of that, you know. Only about half of Americans are invested in the stock market, almost everybody drives a car.

CABRERA: All right. Christine Romans, thank you as always.

And thank you for joining me today. "@THIS HOUR WITH BERMAN AND MICHAELA" starts right after a quick break. Happy Monday.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)