On Wednesday, March 11th, the trial for suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will begin. Tsarnaev is the younger of the two suspected in the bombing. His older brother, Tamerlan, died in a police shootout a few days after the bombing two years ago.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev surrendered days after the attack while standing in a boat that was being stored in a Watertown, MA neighborhood, covered in his own blood and near unconscious, and accused of killing three and injuring hundreds.

The 21-year-old Kyrgyzstan-born, naturalised US citizen faces 30 charges, including using a weapon of mass destruction, conspiring to bomb a public place, bombing a public place resulting in death, and possessing a firearm.

This is the highest-profile federal terrorism case on American soil since the conviction and then execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber in 1997. Dzhokhar faces the death sentence if convicted.

The case is expected to drag on for months and should have a defense that will say Dzhokhar was a junior partner, impressionable, young and absorbed into his older brother’s plan. They don’t aim to claim his innocence, but do hope to take some of the blame off him and lessen his likely sentence.