The bombs that erupted at the finish line of the Boston marathon on April 15^th, forced many Americans to reevaluate the state of national security and the threat of terrorism from its own citizens.

After a five-day manhunt through the suburbs just outside of Boston, police found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 20, (commonly referred to as Jahar) hiding under the cover of a boat in a Watertown resident’s backyard. Tsarneav was in critical condition due to injuries incurred during the manhunt. Rolling Stone magazine reported in July 2013 that there was “jihadist screed scrawled on the [boat] walls” that referred to US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It stated, “the U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians” and “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished. . . . We Muslims are one body; you hurt one, you hurt us all.” All of these “messages” coincide with Tsarnaev’s profoundly revealing tweets in the days leading up to his detonation of the bombs, carried out along with his brother  Tamerlan, who was killed after multiple “gunshot wounds to the torso and extremities,” reported the Huffington Post in May.

At the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Tsarnaev admitted “that he had been involved in laying the bombs that killed three people at the finish line of the Boston Marathon,” and that he and his brother had acted alone, which refuted the notion that the Tsarnaev brothers were part of a terrorist group, according to the New York Times. A friend of Tsarnaev voiced that the younger brother “did express that he thought acts of terrorism were justified,” in addition to other friends claiming that Tsarnaev had “mentioned he knew how to build bombs.”

Jahar and his deceased brother, Tamerlan, are accused of “building and planting pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the annual race,” reported USA Today in September. Despite his prior admittance at the hospital, at the arraignment on July 10^th, Tsarnaev pleaded innocent to all of the charges in the “30-count federal indictment, which includes charges of using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death and 16 other charges that carry the possibility of the death penalty,” reported the paper.

On September 23^rd, reported USA Today, the appointed lawyers for Tsarnaev requested extended time so that they could gather enough information for their proposal against the prosecutors’ planned recommendation to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for the death penalty. The death penalty, which is not practiced in Massachusetts, is applicable to Tsarnaev because he is going to be tried in federal court.