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Tsarnaev Breaks Silence, Apologizes; Former Inmate Says Mitchell, Matt Would Sneak Off to Closet; "Most Hated Man" Represented Blacks in Court. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired June 24, 2015 - 14:30   ET

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

[14:30:00] BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome pack to CNN and to our viewers around the world. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Breaking news out of Boston, Massachusetts, the convicted terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has officially been sentenced by a judge in the Boston federal courthouse. What's significant here is not that he's been formally sentenced. What's significant is that he's now officially broken his silence, stood up at that defense table and addressed the judge, owned it, and apologized. Again, the question is, how does he feel about this in his heart and head. Is this true remorse or not? We may never know. But let me tell you exactly what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said in this courtroom. "I'd like to now apologize to the victims and survivors. If there's any lingering doubt, I did it along with my brother." He said, "I am sorry for lives that I have taken." And then with this judge, this judge, George O'Toole, said to him, "Whenever your name is mentioned, what will be remembered is the evil you did. What will be remembered is you murdered and maimed innocent people." And many of those innocents, the survivors, the victims' family members sat and remembered, and even some of the jurors in this trial in Boston were sitting in this federal courthouse listening.

So was our national correspondent, Deborah Feyerick, outside the courthouse.

We're watching and waiting to see if any of the family members will take the podium but before they do, Deb, can you tell me how did he sound? How did he appear standing there in court?

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, he had a very thick accent actually, and there were times it was very, very difficult to hear what he was saying. In fact, it was the reporters in the overflow room who had a much better perspective what he was doing. You know, it was just -- it was -- he was wearing a dark suit, same suit that he had worn throughout his trial and the determination of guilt and his hair was sort of slightly longer as was his beard. When he listened to the victim impact statements he sort of slouched in the chair, sort of his traditional position, but he suggested that he real he been listening to all the people who stood up to testify.

It was interesting. We spoke to the father of an amputee, a young man who lost his leg at the site of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's bomb and the father says he doesn't believe it. He thinks the lawyer set him up to it. Had plenty of time to show remorse and plenty of time to apologize as well. The boyfriend of one of the victims said something very similar, I mean, they really had been waiting for this. It was one of the people inside, one of the victims who said that he should forgo the appeals so that everyone could move forward in peace, and that really resonated. Not clear whether that's going to happen. There are more motions that will be file. His lawyer is expected to appeal, so it could be a long time, but he is going to Terre Haute, Indiana, the same prison where Timothy McVeigh also stayed on death row before his executions.

BALDWIN: Deborah Feyerick, stand by for me.

Joey Jackson and Ashleigh Banfield are with me on set.

We mentioned, if he goes to Terre Haute, and talk about the appeals, but I think it's just worth repeating, some of the family members and certainly the youngest of those victims, Martin Richard, it was his parents, who came forward who said we hope he isn't sentenced to death because we don't want to be put through appeal after appeal after appeal and be dragged through this. You can't blame him. You only hope that he has this mandatory appeal as you were discussing and like Timothy McVeigh no more.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: He walked from all the others, yeah.

Well, think about this for a moment though. Let's just say that he does go through the appellate process. Let's just say it's overturned. Nobody should be concerned about the life that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would live otherwise. He was sentenced to multiple life sentences. The boy is 21, I believe. That amounts to about 60 or 70 years in effectively solitary confinement, 60 to 70 years. Think about what a life sentence for a kid who is 21 means. He's not going anywhere any time even if anything happens in the next 10, 20 years.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: What would be the likelihood -- really, the world sat through this trial.

BANFIELD: That it's overturned?

BALDWIN: That it would be overturned.

BANFIELD: Very likely. Very likely.

JOEY JACKSON, HLN LEGAL ANALYST: Here's the point. Understand when we talk about appeals, Brooke, what we're looking at is some error of law made by the judge. You don't get an appeal because you lose. Just to understand what the concept is, there would have to be some error of law that the judge made which warrants the conviction being overturned.

BALDWIN: Such as?

BANFIELD: Procedural.

JACKSON: Let's talk about this, procedural issues. But there was a very big movement afoot by his defense attorneys to move that trial out of Boston.

BALDWIN: Right.

JACKSON: You remember that.

BALDWIN: Change of venue, right.

JACKSON: And there were several change-of-venue motions made under the theory that he can not possibly get a fair trial here. Now, that's up to the discretion of the trial judge, and it's very difficult to move it out of a venue, but the argument was if there ever was a case to be moved, this was such a case so that certainly will be a grounds for appeal here. In addition to that, the attorneys will argue that they were ill prepared to move forward because they needed more time. The judge granted them one request for additional time but did not grant them additional. Those are two apparent base ease for appeal that we covered extensively.

There's always the other minute issues that are, as Ashleigh mentioned are procedural, throughout course of the trial that the attorneys will seize upon. It does not mean that they have merit but certainly it means that there are bases ease of appeal that they will use to try to spare his life.

[14:35:31] BANFIELD: There's politics, too -- maybe it was procedurally perfect. Maybe everything that was preserved on the record does not fly in any kind of appeal, but then you've got SCOTUS, Supreme Court, lethal injection drugs, the crisis that's befallen the industry of execution, and we're in the modern-day death penalty, 75 -- oh, let me change that-- 76 people have been sentenced to death. Three have died since '88. So I'm not 100 percent sure that we'll be confident that this execution will be carried out.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: You can hear people watching and thinking, of all cases --

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: But of all cases, of all people this would be the one not to overturn.

JACKSON: Exactly, and not to continue to beat the drum, but Ashleigh and I have talked about this issue a lot, and that's the Timothy McVeigh that we talked about before.

BALDWIN: Right.

JACKSON: That we always have to understand that he was sentenced to death, and he died, and it was pretty quickly. From the actual bombing of '95 to the actual indictment and trial of '97 to the sentencing of death in '97 to the actual execution in 2001, so we don't know at this point whether, and Ashleigh raises very meritorious points, whether or not it's prolonged because of all the issues going on in the Supreme Court about lethal injection.

BALDWIN: But he owned it.

JACKSON: That's true.

BALDWIN: He stood up in that courthouse and said I did it with my brother.

JACKSON: And he may also own not appealing any further, as McVeigh did, telling his lawyers I don't want to go through this anymore. You know, I don't want to be in jail anymore, get it over with. That's what happened with McVeigh. It could very well happen with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

BANFIELD: And I have to just put this on the record, guys, that in 20 years, and if that's the lifetime that it usually takes, 20 years.

BALDWIN: 20 years.

BANFIELD: Roughly, 20 years. I'm not sure where America is going to be in 10 years or 20 years on the issue of the death penalty. There has been a steady decline of support for the death penalty in this nation. I'm not saying it isn't around 50/50. It is, but that's today, and we join a very I'm going to say unwelcome club with North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia as nations that use the death penalty in punishing their own citizens, so if we want to continue to belong to that club or move in a different direction, it may affect this.

JACKSON: The only issue, quickly, with that though is in the event we move away from the death penalty as a society, and we know the vast majority of jurisdictions have the death penalty, that generally the laws will apply prospectively, meaning we get rid of the death penalty from that day forward. I don't know how it affects or if it will affect other cases that are pending. It may very well have that effect.

BANFIELD: It sprung Charles Manson. It sprung Charles Manson. He sits today in California. Was a death row inmate and will never, ever again be a death row inmate.

BALDWIN: Stay with me.

We have to take a quick break here. Breaking news now from this murderer, convicted terrorist speaking for the very first time in the federal courthouse from Boston. We're waiting to hear from family members, from survivors in moments. Stay with me.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:42:49] BALDWIN: We will take you back to Boston and to this breaking news in just a moment. Live pictures outside this federal courthouse. For the first time, we've heard from this convicted terrorist who has been sentenced officially to die, and so he has broken his silence and stood in court and apologized to those victims and family members. And we should be hearing from some of those family members and some of those survivors in the courthouse at that podium any minute now so we're keeping an eye on that. Meantime, also keeping an eye on this hunt to find these two escaped

killers, and now have incredible details about how this prison seamstress essentially facilitated their escape. It involves baked goods. Yeah. A law enforcement source telling CNN that for several months Joyce Mitchell would bake pastries for the prison guards in exchange for favors for Richard Matt and David Sweat. One of the favors, asking a guard to pass frozen hamburger meat to Matt, bypassing the prison's metal detectors.

Hearing so much about Joyce Mitchell's alleged sexual relationship with the man known as "Hacksaw," Richard Matt, who dismembered his boss, but today, in an explosive interview with CNN, we learned her relationship with the other inmate, the cop killer, this is David Sweat, may have been equally intimate.

A former inmate telling CNN's John Berman and Kate Bolduan that the pair would sneak off into a dark closet.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIK JENSEN, FORMER INMATE: The relationship was -- in simple terms, it would be when the cute guy at high school asks, you know, the girl to the prom and the look on her face every day when they would get together and they would talk and they would laugh, giggle, conversations all day long. And when they go in the back room at end of the day to count the garments I never thought anything about this after this took place. There are relationships in the prison were you get to know an officer.

(CROSSTALK)

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Not like this.

JENSEN: Definitely, not like this.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: They went into the back room.

JENSEN: Correct.

BERMAN: That's the closet.

JENSEN: That's correct. Well, it's where they keep the materials. It's not an actual closet, where you can actually walk in. There's a door on it and they keep the materials that were completed and materials that need to be done.

BERMAN: And Joyce Mitchell and David Sweat were in there alone a lot.

JENSEN: Correct.

BERMAN: What did you think was going on?

JENSEN: A running joke inside of his tailor shop that this was his boo, his --

BOLDUAN: His girlfriend. JENSEN: His girlfriend.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[14:45:15] BALDWIN: Joining me now Susan Jones, former warden for the Colorado Department of Corrections and professor of the Colorado Technical University. And Susan also did a dissertation conducting extensive interviews with four female correction employees who had engaged in romantic relationships with inmate.

Susan, welcome to you, first and foremost.

SUSAN JONES, PROFESSOR, COLORADO TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY & FORMER WARDEN, COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS: Thank you.

BALDWIN: You know, based upon these interviews with the women, simplest question, first, how the heck do they find these inmates, these murderers attractive?

JONES: That's a really simple question and I wish there was a one- word, one-sentence answer for that, but if you have to are that working in a corrections environment, you're working around these inmates, these murders, as you put it, all day long every day. Perhaps in this particular situation she had a lot of contact with the offenders, particular inmates, all day long every day where they stopped looking like murders, stop looking like inmates, and start looking like people, start looking like man and when we have staff members working in really isolated parts of our institution this, unfortunately, can happen, and as we see in the news that's being reported out of New York, this is apparently part of what happened there are you? Now, you talk about how these women sometimes feel isolated but at the same time this story is different because this woman's husband actually works at this maximum security prison, so I'm not sure how isolated she really would feel.

JONES: Well, you know, I've never met her. I've never talked to her or her husband.

BALDWIN: Nor have I, obviously. Let's be fair.

JONES: We're talking about an institution. She may see staff members including perhaps her husband on the way into the institution and eight, nine, ten hours, whatever her shift is on the way out, that may be the next time that she sees a staff member perhaps, depending on their particular setup, so when I'm talking about isolating. I'm not talking about a lack of connection outside of work. I'm talking about that connection that all of us feel, go after, pursue, whatever it is in our pork place, and that's just another workplace really sometimes.

BALDWIN: Understand.

JONES: When you don't have staff making round, don't have staff in there, don't have staff that you're working beside, again, these inmates can become your co-workers and I'm not saying that all co- workers we work with we enter into sexual relationships but that might explain had a was going on with her in that situation. BALDWIN: I understand. A perform place romance and, at the same

time, if I'm Joyce Mitchell, how do I compartmentalize somebody's criminal background and hacking up their boss. Is this a little detail that fade away?

JONES: Well, first of all, I'm not making this a workplace romance. The consequences were seen in the news every day, but sometimes you don't even know what the become ground is of the institutions. In some institutions, the culture is we don't want to know. We're expected to treat them as a professional and professionally and within ethical guidelines. So people choose not to know what these people were in prison for. I don't know if that was the case for Joyce Mitchell.

BALDWIN: I see.

JONES: But that's really common. I've worked with lots of offenders that I had no idea what they did and some of that was on purpose.

BALDWIN: Susan Jones, thank you so much.

Coming up next, the Confederate flag is still waving in South Carolina, and just moments ago here, the Governor Nikki Haley says she cannot take that flag down even though she wants to. We will tell you why she says that is the case.

Plus, new video of the dramatic capture of the Charleston shooter. Hear the 911 call that sparked a standoff and why police bought the killer Burger King after his arrest.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:52:24] BALDWIN: He was killed because of the color of his skin, but state Senator and pastor, Clementa Pinckney, will be remembered for what he did. His body is lying in repose inside the capitol there in South Carolina. One week ago, he was killed in a massacre at his church, along with eight others during Bible study. The reverend, who was 41 years of age, became a lawmaker at the age of 23. Friends say he called himself a public servant instead of a politician. A horse- drawn carriage carried Pinckney's body to the capitol where it will lie for the next few hours. Reverend Pinckney's funeral is Friday, and President Obama will deliver the eulogy there.

And as Reverend Pinckney is honored today, the Confederate flag still waves high above the capitol there. This image of his casket being drawn under the controversial flag from our own correspondent, Victor Blackwell.

Today, South Carolina's governor repeated why she herself cannot take the flag down, which would violate current law, but the law may soon change as the world is watching what South Carolina lawmakers will do.

Let's get unique perspective from a voice in South Carolina. And with me from Columbia is the great-grandson of Joseph Tolbert, who Jeremy says was the only attorney back in the '20s and '30s in the state of South Carolina who would even be willing to represent a black man. He was actually once called in a headline the most hated man in the state.

Jeremy, welcome.

JEREMY TOLBERT, GREAT GRANDSON OF ATTORNEY JOSEPH TOLBERT: Thank you.

BALDWIN: I mean, let just begin. Tell me about what it is about your great grandfather at the time to sort of almost be ahead of his time.

[14:55:] TOLBERT: Absolutely. He certainly stood for what was right back when no one else would. He's a former U.S. attorney representing the state of South Carolina. After his post he went back into private practice and was the only white attorney in the state who would represent a black man in court. I think back, what would he think on a week like this with the Confederate flag hopefully coming down here in the next month or so. He would probably think, why did it go up in the first place? . In the early '60s in the midst of the civil rights movement why did it if up in the first place? And why did it take so long to come down? But I think he'd be very happy and proud that South Carolina will come together and we're going to get this done

BALDWIN: I want to hear more about your great grandfather though. I know President Hoover sent him a letter thanking him for his public service, but he also suffered a lot. I mean, he -- he was a victim of the KKK himself. Tell me about what happened.

TOLBERT: Yeah. The stories we heard growing up are incredible. The KKK members would frequently assault him. They would -- he once had his jaw broken by a KKK member with brass knuckles. Cross burnings in his yard of Augusta Road home in Greenville, South Carolina, were the norm. KKK members would beat up black men and throw them on their front porch. Word is what they would say after thee beat the black men up bloodied and threw them on the front of porch. They would say I hope Joe Tolbert is save you.

BALDWIN: You mention that if your great grandfather was here now, what he would think of the Confederate flag, and what do you think he would make of question of the fact that in the state capitol of South Carolina where that flag, you know, still waves high, that this reverend, this African-American man, is lying in repose.

TOLBERT: It's unbelievable. It is unbelievable, 2015, but South Carolina is an incredible state. We've really come together as a people. Democrats, prepare cans, fun to see the state of South Carolina come together like this. I'm speechless at our state and our people and I'm very proud today. I think my great-grandfather would be very impressed as well.

BALDWIN: Very impressive great-granddad.

Jeremy Tolbert, thanks for sharing the stories. I appreciate it.

TOLBERT: Thank you.

BALDWIN: You got it. Coming up next, we'll take you back to our breaking news here, back to

Boston. The convicted bomber, the murderer, the terrorist here, actually for the first time breaking his silence inside this federal courthouse, speaking out and apologizing for what he and his brother did. We're waiting to hear from the survivors and family members outside the courthouse any moment now.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)