The Legal Case

Somehow, the chaos is behind us. The bombings, the terror, the police chase, the shoot-outs are in the history books. One suspect is dead, and another lies wounded in a Boston hospital bed. And that's where the legal case against 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev began yesterday.

A judge magistrate read him his rights. According to a court transcript, Tsarnaev was alert enough to respond by nodding his head, at one point even mouthing the word, "no" when asked if he could afford his own attorney. Then he was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction that killed three people and destroyed public property.

And so a new story about American due process and the trial of the Boston marathon bomber begins.

Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and a professor at Harvard Law School.

Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer and professor at Harvard Law School. You can find his recent comments on the case here.

Here's the charging document released yesterday.