Boston Marathon Bomber Sues for $250K over Ball Cap, Showers in Prison

The Boston Marathon bomber is suing the federal government for $250,000 over what he claims is unlawful and discriminatory treatment at the prison where he is serving his life sentence.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lives at Colorado’s Supermax in Fremont County, according to an Associated Press (AP) article published Friday.

In his lawsuit filed Monday, the report says he cited “the confiscation of a white baseball cap and bandana that he bought at the prison commissary and a limit of three showers per week.”

In the handwritten suit, Tsarnaev claimed the treatment is contributing to his “mental and physical decline.”

The lawsuit was assigned to a federal judge but the judge said Tuesday the filing was “deficient” because it did not have a “certified copy of prisoner’s trust fund statement” or the $402 fee, the Boston Herald reported:

Tsarnaev alleges his baseball cap and bandana were confiscated by prison guards “because, by wearing it, I was ‘disrespecting’ the FBI and the victims” of the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing. “There is no proof and no evidence to support (the) false accusation,” Tsarnaev alleges in his eight-page lawsuit posted on the federal court system.

In October, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked the United States Supreme Court to hear Tsarnaev’s case when a panel of circuit court judges overturned his death sentence, according to Breitbart News:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who first arrived in the U.S. with his family on tourist visas, was previously convicted and sentenced to death for carrying out an Islamist terrorist attack with his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, on April 15, 2013, at the annual Boston Marathon.

Tamerlan died during the manhunt for his arrest.

In the attack, the Tsarnaev brothers killed eight-year-old Martin Richard, 29-year-old Krystle Campbell, 23-year-old Lingzi Lu, and left more than 280 people injured. Later in the evening, the Tsarnaev brothers killed 27-year-old MIT Officer Sean Collier.

This week, former Florence prison warden Bob Hood told the Herald that lawsuits such as Tsarnaev’s are common among inmates, adding, “I get it. He wants more than three showers a week.”

“But he’s twentysomething living in a 7-foot box where life is worse than if he did get the death penalty,” he concluded.