Vox Sentences: The Boston Marathon trial begins

1. Marathon

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

• The trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a suspect in 2013's Boston Marathon bombing, has begun.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Tsarnaev faces 30 federal counts, including "conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death" and "use of a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death; aiding and abetting."

  [WBUR]

• 17 of the charges carry the death penalty, which the government is seeking.

• Reportedly, prosecutors and Tsarnaev's defense team have talked about a plea deal that would prevent an expensive trial and spare him the death penalty, but it didn't happen before the trial began.

  [CNN / Evan Perez]

• There's little doubt of Tsarnaev's guilt, given that surveillance cameras show him by the finish line with his late brother/accomplice Tamerlan, both carrying large bags.

  [Washington Post / Scott Wilson, Greg Miller, and Sari Horwitz]

• A witness — the man Dzhokhar and his late brother Tamerlan carjacked as they tried to avoid capture after the bombing — confirmed that Dzhokhar's brother confessed to the attack.

  [WMUR / Jean Mackin]

• The FBI says he confessed, but they interrogated him for 16 hours without reading him his Miranda rights, meaning that his statements could be thrown out in court; he went silent after being Mirandized.

  [AP / Pete Yost, Lara Jakes, and Rodrique Ngowi]

• His requests for a lawyer pre-Miranda were ignored.

  [LA Times / Richard Serrano, Ken Dilanian, and Brian Bennett]

• The trial is taking place in Boston, which Tsarnaev's counsel has argued will lead to a jury that cannot be impartial.

  [NYT / Katharine Q. Seelye]

• Judy Clarke, Tsaernaev's lawyer, also represented the Unabomber, Atlanta Olympic bomber Eric Randolph, and Gabrielle Giffords' shooter Jared Loughner.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

2. Imagine no police

NYPD graduates salute as Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks. (Andrew Burton / Getty Images News)

• For the second week in a row, the work of the NYPD has slowed to a crawl: 56 percent fewer arrests and over 90 percent fewer criminal summons and parking/traffic tickets.

  [NYT / J. David Goodman and Al Baker]

• 911 calls are still being answered and responded to.

• It's the latest protest the NYPD and the NY police union have conducted against Mayor Bill de Blasio, after he made comments about racism and police that the force perceived as a slight.

  [NY Daily News / Rocco Parascandola, Tina Moore, and Corky Siemaszko]

• But it was only after the killing of two NYPD officers, following de Blasio's comments, that protests picked up.

• There's some historical precedent for work stoppages, for example in 1960s Detroit.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• This work slowdown, combined with no noticeable uptick in crime, isn't enough evidence to say that aggressive policing doesn't reduce crime.

  [Mother Jones / Kevin Drum]

3. Misc.

• SpaceX is going to try to land a rocket on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean tomorrow morning.

  [Vox / Joey Stromberg]

• Malls catering to middle-class customers are faltering as luxury malls prosper.

  [NYT / Nelson Schwartz]

• "Huh" means the same thing in just about every language.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• Canadian researchers have figured out a way to trap bed bugs by sending chemical signals to tell them shelter is nearby.

  [WSJ / Daniel Akst]

• Last year, a woman hiking the Appalachian Trail in Maine disappeared. No one knows how it happened.

  [Boston Globe / Kathryn Miles]

• Two climbers are trying to scale Yosemite National Park's Dawn Wall — which is more than half a mile tall and almost completely vertical — in one go.

  [NYT / John Branch]

4. Verbatim

• "For all the attention they receive, deaths from terrorist attacks are a rounding error on violent deaths worldwide, which in turn are a rounding error on global mortality statistics."

  [Businessweek / Charles Kenny]

• "Whittier, Alaska, is a town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in a 14-story former Army barracks built in 1956."

  [California Sunday / Erin Sheehy]

• "Hide-and-seek, rather than an afternoon’s diversion, is an endless game that is always going on on some level, be it through gradual Cold War-style maneuvering or all-out open hostilities."

  [DC Pierson]

• "You're a fool if you go into a lie detector test thinking that telling the truth is good enough."

  [Peter Moskos to NPR / Martin Kaste]

• "Moghadam’s Cam’ron annotation—­Jamaicans were poor and thus their shirts had holes—was the first in Rap Genius history. It also happened to be wrong and, by his own admission, a little racist."

  [NY Mag / Reeves Wiedeman]

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