Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s $4,000-plus prison canteen account is “offensive,” a former Supermax warden said, considering the marathon bomber’s incarceration has already cost taxpayers more than $1 million.
“He came in indigent, and he should remain an indigent,” Bob Hood told the Herald Monday. “It’s sick that he has any kind of following.”
Hood is the retired warden of Colorado’s ADMAX Florence — the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” — where he said Tsarnaev’s imprisonment has easily eclipsed $1 million. “He’s the million-dollar bomber,” Hood added, and that’s not counting his undisclosed legal tab to date.
Tsarnaev’s New York City lawyer, who did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment Monday, has filed an appeal to stop the feds in Boston from seizing his killer client’s $4,223.86 prison trust account.
“He is neither hoarding funds nor spending profligately,” wrote attorney David Patton in a new entry in Tsarnaev’s voluminous federal file.
The 30-year-old Tsarnaev is on death row at the prison, where his lawyer adds he earns $25 a month “working as a sanitation orderly.” He dips into his canteen account to buy “commissary items such as allergy medication, sweat clothes needed to do outdoor orderly work, food, and stamps,” his lawyer adds.
Tsarnaev pays “$35 per month toward his (criminal) restitution balance” of $101,000,000. His lawyer writes that he has paid about $2,600 to date.
Prosecutors in Boston have said Tsarnaev has received about $26,000 in donations from various sources — including strangers, his sisters and lawyers, the Herald has learned from court documents and telephone calls made to his sisters in New Jersey. One sister declined to comment about her various $500 checks or about prosecutors attempting to seize the cash.
Tsarnaev also received a $1,400 COVID-19 relief payment two years ago, his lawyer confirms, that has been “placed under administrative hold” by the Board of Prisons.
“Tsarnaev continues to receive unsolicited deposits from people whom he has never met,” his lawyer wrote, adding, “Tsarnaev has not had access” to that money.
This legal skirmish lands less than a month after the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that allegations of potential juror bias in Tsarnaev’s 2015 trial “require further factfinding by the district court.” This does not change the death sentence but could lead to a “new penalty-phase proceeding.”
Hood said he isn’t against Tsarnaev earning a few dollars working in the prison, but other money funneled to such a killer is “offensive,” especially considering the victims. “Why would he even get a penny?” Hood added.
The bombing at the marathon finish line in 2013 killed Martin Richard, 8; Krystle Campbell, 29; and Lu Lingzi, 23. Others were maimed, and more than 260 people were injured. MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, 27, was shot execution-style days later in the manhunt for the bombers.
Boston Police Officer Dennis Simmonds, 28, injured in the Watertown shootout in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed by his brother Dzhokhar as he raced away from the scene, died in April 2014.