He did it. We all knew he did it. The prosecution knew it. The defence, the jury, the judge. Everyone apart from the wacko conspiracists knew that on a Monday afternoon, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev walked through Boston and exploded a terrible bomb.
There was so much video and so many photos to consider and process in those first few days. Body-armoured cops with urban tanks and assault rifles guarded every corner and leered at every foreign journalist's ID.
During the trial it was easy to forget that for three days after the explosions, we didn't know who to blame. You could look at those clean surveillance pictures, the two brothers with their baseball caps strolling through the crowd, and forget that for an uncomfortable period everyone in Boston was a suspect.
You could look at the pictures of the blasts, the thump of the explosions, the clean flashes and the dust, and still not appreciate the sheer violence and trauma, tearing and screaming and blood. Ball bearings and nails: no wonder so many people lost legs.
The verdicts were a foregone conclusion; not enough even to lead the news in a country obsessed with terror and bombs. The public, you expect, is hanging out for the second act.
