AT JAHAR’S AGE, a year and a half is a long time. When he next appeared in public, in December 2014, he no longer looked like a gawky adolescent. His beard had come in dark and curly, if spotty. No trace of injury was visible, at least from a distance of a few yards. His mane of hair was disheveled. He was dressed for triaclass="underline" a white shirt, a black pullover, gray slacks. He no longer spoke with a Russian accent as he affirmed to the judge that he was satisfied with his defense team.
Over the next couple of months he would not say anything else that was audible to the public. His look would gradually be tamed: he got a haircut, and the beard got a series of progressively closer trims. He would be brought to Boston’s waterfront federal courthouse amid heavy security every day—traffic closed off for blocks, Coast Guard boats in the water—and sit at a large table, flanked by Miriam Conrad and a jury consultant, as the court interviewed 256 people in what at times appeared like a vain search for eighteen people who could constitute an impartial jury.
The process, originally planned for three weeks, lasted two months, albeit with many snow-related delays. Most of the potential jurors were middle-aged, almost all of them were white, and none of them could be seen as Jahar’s peers. Very, very few of them seemed, on the face of it, suited to serve on this jury. On a detailed written questionnaire filled out before their interviews, sixty-eight percent had said they believed the defendant was guilty. Pressed by the judge to promise that they could set aside this presumption and listen to the evidence, most issued the promise easily, a few balked, and one, a psychologist, said, “I don’t know that the brain works that way.”
Some difficulties were inherent in seating a jury in a death penalty case: If it convicted the defendant, the same jury would have to reconvene to determine the penalty. People who are fundamentally opposed to capital punishment are disqualified from serving on death penalty juries, as are people who believe that all intentional murder should be punished by death. But finding people who have no strong views on the death penalty is a difficult proposition, and indeed, when the rare juror claimed that he or she had never given the issue much thought, it might have made one wonder how thoughtful this person was really capable of being. Members of the defense team also occasionally wondered whether potential jurors had been coached on answers that would make them likely to be selected—in order to write an eventual book, or to ensure that Jahar got the death penalty. For its part, all the defense needed was one juror who in the end would vote for life imprisonment: the defendant could be sentenced to death only if the decision was unanimous.
And so the process dragged on and on, some days yielding not a single suitable candidate. Jahar looked bored, even absent, most of the time: he leaned back in his chair and doodled on his legal pad. Only once did I see him actually look at a potential juror’s file: this was a young Mexican-born political science professor who studied immigrants and immigration; his opposition to the death penalty disqualified him.
As the weeks wore on and the snow piled up, the number of reporters in the press room dwindled. The room reserved for members of the public who wanted to watch jury selection through a video uplink was often deserted. One day, a young Latino man with a close-cropped beard and equally short hair on his head was the only person there. His name was Luis Vasquez.
Luis’s wife had woken him on the Friday morning after the bombing. She shook him, that is, until he was awake. Then she tried to say something, but words refused to form. She pointed at the television and said, “Look at the names.” There were the same pictures the couple had seen on the screen the evening before, but now the suspects were identified. Luis had not recognized Tamerlan earlier because, frankly, the guy on television did not look like Tamerlan. “The Tamerlan I knew never wore a hat—his hair was far too good for that. He never wore sunglasses: girls loved his eyes. He was never clean-shaven, he always had a five-o’clock shadow going unless he had to shave for boxing. He was never stooped. The Tamerlan I knew was tall, he stood proud, he was a beautiful man.” The man in the photos looked ordinary, even dumpy; Tamerlan and Luis had always been the opposite of that.
They had become friends at Rindge and Latin because they both shadowed a tight-knit group of ESL girls: Tamerlan was keeping watch over Bella, and Luis was trailing his girlfriend, Bella’s best friend, who was Venezuelan. Now this girl, who had become Luis’s wife, was pointing at the television set while Luis “felt like I was floating, like I was pulled out of my own body.”
Then CNN called, and Luis became a star of its Boston bombing show. He did not know much—he realized how little Tamerlan had disclosed whenever they had run into each other in the years after graduating from high school—but compared with people who had been talking into microphones before him, Luis was an expert. He debunked the theory that the brothers “had been brought up to be terrorists,” as he had already heard it put on the air. He stressed that they had been living in Cambridge for a decade. He mentioned that he had often seen Tamerlan in the library studying.
After high school their paths had been fairly similar. Both got married. Both became fathers: Luis’s first son was born when he was nineteen. Luis had dropped out of the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as Bunker Hill. Both of them had been staring at hard and hopeless lives as working-class young fathers in an overpriced American city where they had been led to believe they could lead lives of meaning. About a month before the bombing, Luis had announced his candidacy for the Cambridge city council, the longest shot on a long list. And now he was on national television. He looked great. Strangers on Twitter began tagging CNN with calls for the network to hire him as an on-air personality. When it was all over, Luis applied to the competitive journalism department at Emerson College, and, with an over-the-top recommendation from CNN, he was admitted (he still lost his city council race). The college was not far from the courthouse, so Luis discovered the peculiar pleasure of spending some of his afternoons watching the interminable process of jury selection.
The week I met with Luis, a federal appeals court had heard the defense argue—as it had repeatedly in written motions—that the trial should be moved from Boston. Between the saturation publicity and what she called “the six degrees of connection,” argued Judith Mizner, the public defender’s appellate chief, justice in Massachusetts could not have the necessary “appearance of justice.”
It was not a large state, and the Boston Marathon was a very large event in it: one after another, potential jurors had said that they knew someone on the witness list or someone who had been at the finish line or a first responder, or they worked for a company that sponsored the marathon or a hospital that treated some of the victims. As if to underscore the effects of saturation publicity, one of the judges had asked a prosecutor about “the video of the defendant placing a backpack at the site of the explosion.” This was a video that, if it existed, had never been shown to the public—a fact the prosecutor failed to point out. The following day, one of the prospective jurors also made reference to having seen this purported video.
To my surprise, Luis, who seemed to have perfected the political art of speaking with detachment about anything, waxed passionate against moving the trial. “It’s an attempt to strip us of our dignity all over again,” he said. “If someone has the audacity to hurt our community, they should have the cojones to face us back and to explain.” Did he really think he would get an explanation from Jahar, who was not likely even to testify at his own trial? Luis admitted that he did not. After a few minutes, we circled back to April 2013. The afternoon of the marathon, Luis had been planning to go to the finish line with his family. He had not much wanted to, so they had been slow leaving the apartment. Luis had stepped back in to turn off the television—and on it, had seen the explosions.