News Digest

Road to justice: Boston Marathon bombing trial begins with jury selection

Some 1,200 potential jurors are due to report to federal court in Boston beginning on Monday as selection begins for the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, charged with the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others. Tsarnaev, a 21-year-old ethnic Chechen who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, could get the death penalty if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty to all 30 charges against him. Tsarnaev is accused of detonating a pair of homemade bombs placed amid a crowd of thousands of spectators at the race’s finish line on April 15, 2013.

The real value may be to start to try to generate even a little bit of empathy around this and humanize the kid a little bit, hopefully enough to save a life.

Christopher Dearborn, Suffolk University Law School professor, on the possible defense used by Tsarnaev’s team—namely that he felt pressured by any persecution his family might have suffered as ethnic minorities in Kyrgyzstan

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole will seek to whittle down the field of 1,200 people to a panel of 12 jurors and six alternates to hear a trial expected to last three to five months. The large size of the jury pool, which has already been through an initial round of screening through surveys sent out by mail, reflects the intense interest in the case. Tsarnaev’s attorneys had sought to have the proceedings moved out of Boston. They argued it would be impossible to find an impartial local jury because of intense news coverage and the fact that thousands of people attended the race or hid in their homes during a day-long lockdown in the greater Boston area after the bombing.

The U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians… We Muslims are one body… Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.

Text scrawled on the boat where Tsarnaev was found after a lengthy manhunt; something prosecutors hope to use in their defense