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 Tsarnaev, 21, is charged with killing three people and injuring
264 with a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs that ripped
through the crowd at the race's finish line on April 15, 2013. He
could be sentenced to death if convicted of charges that also
include fatally shooting a police officer.
Prosecutors told U.S. District Judge George O'Toole on Monday that
they may want to show as evidence autopsy photos of the attack's
victims, one an 8-year-old boy.
They also want to play clips from an FBI news conference where
officials released photos of Tsarnaev and his older brother
identifying them as suspects and setting off a course of events that
led to a day-long lockdown of most of the Boston area amid a massive
manhunt.
Defense attorneys, meanwhile, aim to portray Tsarnaev as having been
under the spell of his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, who they
contend was the mastermind behind the attack. Tamerlan died
following an April 18, 2013, gun battle with police.
 Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to all charges in a 30-count
indictment.
A replaying of some of the graphic evidence of the attack could
trigger fears among people who lived in the area during the bombing
week, said Alice LoCicero, a Boston Medical Center psychologist who
has researched the psychology of terrorist attacks.
"What people might anticipate is a return of some of the same
feelings that they had at the time of the initial bombing," LoCicero
said. "A lot of fear may be associated with reliving some of those
events."
A panel of 10 women and eight men, all white, were chosen to hear
Tsarnaev's trial and, if they find him guilty, to determine whether
to sentence him to death or life in prison without the possibility
of parole in proceedings expected to last into June.
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Security is expected to be tight around Boston's waterfront federal
courthouse, where officials have closed some nearby roads amid
several large-scale construction projects.
Defense attorneys had cited the "Boston Strong" signs that hung on
some of those sites in their four requests to move the trial out of
the city that was the site of the largest mass-casualty attack on
U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
The courtroom is expected to be packed with family members of the
bombing's victims, as well as some of those who were wounded, 16 of
whom lost legs.
The bombing killed restaurant manager Krystle Campbell, 29; graduate
student Lingzi Lu, 23, and Martin Richard, 8. Massachusetts
Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 27, was fatally
shot three days later.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Eric Beech)
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