The Murders Before the Marathon: What happened to Boston bombers Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?

Boston bombers Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly set off two homemade pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon's finish line on April 15, 2013. Not days later, in addition to the bombings, they also murdered a police officer.

While Tamerlan was killed by police in a gunfight, Dzhokhar was found guilty on 30 accounts. The jury that found him guilty gave him the death penalty for the bombings that killed three and injured over 260 in Boston. However, the death penalty was later overturned after President Joe Biden's administration suspended capital punishment in federal prosecutions.

Now, a Hulu documentary titled The Murders Before the Marathon, will have investigative journalist Susan Zalkind link the Boston bombers to a horrific triple murder homicide that took place in Waltham on September 11, 2011, on the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Zalkind will search for potential underlying secrets surrounding the Waltham triple murder case.

The Murders Before the Marathon airs on Hulu this Monday, September 5, 2022, at 12 am ET.

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Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence was overturned earlier this year

The Supreme Court agreed with the Justice Department in its appeal of a 2020 federal appeals court judgment that had maintained Tsarnaev's guilt as one of the Boston bombers but reversed his death penalty, voting 6-3 in the state's favor. Tsarnaev will not face a death sentence any time soon considering President Joe Biden's administration's ban on capital punishment in federal matters.

The First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston was criticized by the Supreme Court for its judgment that Tsarnaev's right to a fair trial was breached and that the judge in question wrongly withheld significant evidence related to a separate crime. Three of the court's liberal justices strongly disagreed, but the remaining six conservative justices were in the majority.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly stated:

"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev committed heinous crimes. The Sixth Amendment nonetheless guaranteed him a fair trial before an impartial jury. He received one."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's defense has maintained that he was only an accomplice to his brother, referred to as "an authority figure" with "violent Islamic extremist beliefs," in the bombing. They claimed that as a result, information connected to a separate crime that Tamerlan allegedly committed would be crucial in the case.

Justice Stephen Breyer reportedly agreed and said,

"This evidence may have led some jurors to conclude that Tamerlan's influence was so pervasive that Dzhokhar did not deserve to die for any of the actions he took in connection with the bombings, even those taken outside of Tamerlan's presence."

Breyer further added,

"And it would have taken only one juror's change of mind to have produced a sentence other than death, even if a severe one."

The Supreme Court later determined that the judge in the case did not violate Tsarnaev's right to a fair trial by failing to sufficiently screen possibly biased jurors in the wake of extensive press coverage of the explosions.

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Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is currently posted in a federal prison in Colorado, wanting to stay his execution for his role in the marathon bombings.

Learn more about the Boston bombers' case in Hulu's upcoming docuseries, The Murders Before the Marathon.