Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is suing the federal government for a quarter of a million dollars while serving a life sentence at a Colorado prison.
The 26-year-old Boston Marathon bomber calls his treatment at the penitentiary “unlawful, unreasonable and discriminatory.” According to a handwritten suit filed on Monday, Tsarnaev says the confiscation of a white baseball cap he bought at the prison commissary and the limit of three showers per week have contributed to his “mental and physical decline” at the supermax Federal Correctional Complex Florence.
Among the allegations in the lawsuit, Tsarnaev says his cap and bandana were removed by prison guards “because, by wearing it, I was ‘disrespecting’ the FBI and the victims” of the 2013 bombing.
Law enforcement initially identified Tsarnaev as "White Hat," referring to the white baseball cap he wore backward as seen on surveillance video while tracking the movements of the bombers before and after the blasts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon that killed three people while injuring more than 260 others.