Boston Marathon Bomber Files $250K Suit Over Treatment in Prison

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is suing the federal government for $250,000 over his treatment inside the Colorado supermax prison where he is serving a life sentence — claiming his baseball cap was confiscated and he has been restricted to only three showers a week, according to a new report.

In the handwritten suit, Tsarnaev accused guards and the warden at the Federal Correctional Complex Florence — called the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” — of being “unlawful, unreasonable and discriminatory,” The Boston Herald reported.

His treatment, he alleged, has made him so anxious that it is contributing to his “mental and physical decline.”

The 26-year-old claimed that prison guards confiscated his baseball cap and bandana “because, by wearing [the cap], I was ‘disrespecting’ the FBI and the victims” of the April 15, 2013, bombing, according to the report.

“There is no proof and no evidence to support [the] false accusation,” Tsarnaev wrote in the eight-page lawsuit.

Before Tsarnaev was taken into custody, investigators described the suspect as a man in a backwards “white hat,” according to the report.

The Polo cap was used as evidence in Tsarnaev’s death penalty sentencing, according to the report.

His death sentence was tossed last fall after the appeals court said the judge fell short in running a jury selection process “sufficient to identify prejudice.”

But the Justice Department is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case in an attempt to reinstate the death penalty, calling it “one of the most important terrorism prosecutions in our nation’s history.”

Tsarnaev’s suit was filed Monday and assigned to a federal judge, court records obtained by the Herald show. The next day, however, the judge said the “filing is deficient” because it lacks a “certified copy of prisoner’s trust fund statement” and a $402 filing fee.

Such a lawsuit is common among inmates, former Florence prison warden Bob Hood told the Herald.

“I get it. He wants more than three showers a week,” Hood said. “But he’s twentysomething living in a 7-foot box where life is worse than if he did get the death penalty.”

Tsarnaev, who attended UMass Dartmouth at the time of the bombing, and his older brother, Tamerlan, killed three people and wounded more than 260 others when they set off two bombs at the marathon finish line.

Lingzi Lu, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student from China; Krystle Campbell, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Medford; and 8-year-old Martin Richard, who had gone to watch the marathon with his family, were killed.

The Tsarnaevs shot Massachusetts Institute of Technology police Officer Sean Collier execution-style in his cruiser days later.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died following a gunfight with police and being run over by his brother as he fled.

Boston Police Officer Dennis Simmonds, 28, injured in the shootout that killed Tamerlan, died in April 2014.