There are two trials right now in Boston that are riveting those who live here as well as people across the country. In the US District Court on Boston’s waterfront, victims with lost limbs from the bombs set off by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at the Boston Marathon in 2013 are reliving the horror many saw on television in the hours after the explosions.

About 60 miles to the south in Fall River, prosecutors are methodically laying out their case against former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez who is accused of murdering Odin Lloyd. While the two trials are markedly different in substance and resonance, they’re also split by one other issue: the Hernandez trial is being streamed live with some television stations picking up portions of the broadcast, while those interested in the proceedings in Tsarnaev’s case have to go to social media or watch or read the recaps.

There has been a pilot program ongoing in the federal court system, but it’s been nearly four years and cameras in the courtrooms have yet to get a firm foothold among judges. Federal judges, especially the Supreme Court, have consistently rejected calls to open up their courtrooms like most states do, claiming it could make a mockery out of the proceedings and impair a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Some generally point to the O.J. Simpson trial as proof of what can happen when a trial becomes a show rather than a legal proceeding.

Eileen McNamara, in a WBUR column, dismisses the old saw that televising the Tsarnaev trial would have turned it into a circus. She says we’re left with trial by tweet instead. McNamara argues that, for Boston alone, which was most impacted by the bombings, there should have been some accommodation to televise the trial.

“Whatever the outcome of the case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the trial of the admitted Boston Marathon bomber underscores the need to end the ban on televising federal court proceedings,” she writes. “If any case called out for full community access to the judicial process, it was this one.”

In the Hernandez trial, television stations have been able to show videos of the former star in the hours before the alleged shooting and the moments after where he appeared to be carrying a gun. Those not able to make the trek to Fall River get to see what the jury gets to see: videos, crime scene photos, the power of emotional witness testimony, the nuances and vocal inflections of the attorneys. It’s all there for someone to get the whole picture rather than a summation that may miss a fact or be unable to relay a tense moment.

In the Tsarnaev trial, readers have to rely on artists’ renderings, which are often abstract and show next to nothing, and scroll through the Twitter feed to keep up with the testimony and evidence.  While concerns over attorneys playing to the cameras has been cited as one resistance to televising trials, federal courts only recently — and reluctantly — agreed to allow reporters to bring in other technology such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones which they use to communicate to the outside world in real time. Some judges and clerks had expressed reservations that the constant clicking and tapping of keyboards, like the sound of camera shutters and whirling of videotape they so fear, would be a distraction to jurors and witnesses trying to concentrate but the world didn’t collapse when they relented. Which brings up the logical next step: If you can tweet from inside the courtroom, how much more intrusive would a stationary camera be?

There is irony in the juxtaposition of the two proceedings. The Hernandez trial is being held in the Bristol Superior Court in Fall River. It’s the same court, though not the same courthouse, where more than 30 years ago the Big Dan rape case was the first major trial to be televised nationally, then on the emerging CNN. The case was overseen by then-state Judge William Young, who allowed the proceedings to be televised because of the issues and the interest. Young is now a senior federal judge in the US District Court in the same building where Tsarnaev is facing his accusers.

It’s unlikely the public pressure from the bombing trial will force the federal judiciary’s hand but, coming as it does at the same time and in the same state as the completely open and accessible Hernandez trial, it should give them some pause to reconsider. If they watch, that is.

–JACK SULLIVAN

BEACON HILL 

The Senate listening tour goes to Roxbury where residents share concerns about housing, education, and transportation. At their stop in Fall River, they were joined by US Rep. William Keating and Attorney General Maura Healey, where the focus was on drug overdoses and abuse.

The state’s public health commissioner plans a review of all state hospitals, State House News reports.

MUNICIPAL MATTERS

US Rep. — and decorated Iraq War veteran — Seth Moulton will march in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade with a contingent honoring lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender veterans.

Hull voters will decide whether to remove the town’s fire and police chiefs from Civil Service.

The city of Gardner sold a Norman Rockwell painting 10 months ago for $1.9 million, but officials are still debating what to use the money for, the Telegram & Gazette reports.

If Boston doesn’t want the Olympics, there’s always Lowell. (Lowell residents loved the idea at a public forum.) Worcester not so much.

Residents of a multi-family home in Brockton, which is run by the general manager of the renowned Eliot Hotel in Boston’s Back Bay, have been evicted by Brockton officials who deemed the building uninhabitable because of numerous safety code violations.

A South Boston condo development proposal on which Mayor Marty Walsh previously applied the brakes seems to be back on track, and neighbors are not happy.

An arbitration panel awarded Somerset police a 6 percent raise over three years, ending a nearly three-year old contract dispute.

The Saugus Board of Selectmen relinquishes control over the town’s cable television station, the Item reports.

WASHINGTON/NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL

Two police officers were shot during a protest outside the Ferguson, Missouri, police station. The protest and violence came as the city’s police chief became the latest official to step down in the wake of a damning Justice Department report on systemic racism throughout the force.

David French, writing in the National Review, says President Obama is probably a Christian, just not the mainstream kind of Christian, whatever that means.

Palcohol, otherwise known as powdered alcohol, wins federal approval, the Associated Press reports.

ELECTIONS

Clintons? Scandal? Here we go again, writes the Globe’s Annie Linskey.

Would a President Lindsey Graham actually have the military force Congress to stay in Washington and restore cuts to the Defense Department?

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

Colorado’s legalized pot sales hit $36.4 million in January, which meant $2.35 million in excise taxes that will go to schools, the Denver Post reports.

Subscription-based TV services such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon are taking a bite out of TV ratings.

HBO is filming a TV pilot in Gloucester about the period of the Salem witch trials, the Gloucester Times reports.

The new president of the MacArthur Foundation, best known for its annual “genius grants,” is launching a $100 million effort aimed at a single social issue that has yet to be identified.

EDUCATION

The Boston School Committee approved a five-year contract with new superintendentTommy Chang, who will earn $257,000 a year. CommonWealth talked recently with Mayor Marty Walsh about the choice of the Los Angeles school administrator as the city’s next schools leader.

Meanwhile, Dana Bedden may not have landed the Boston job, but perhaps his time in spotlight as one of four finalists for the job had one effect: The Richmond, Virginia, school superintendent’s Twitter account, which had drawn some puzzled comments here because it was closed, is now public.

Scituate officials are trying to determine whether to lease new school buses to replace their aging fleet to hire a private contractor to provide bus service.

Frat reform: Can colleges do it?

HEALTH CARE

A Globe editorial cheers Blue Cross Blue Shield’s expansion of global payment reimbursement that rewards doctors for the quality of outcomes, not the quantity of services provided.

Partners Health Care completes its takeover of Harbor Medical Associates, a move that had been criticized by Attorney General Maura Healey.

TRANSPORTATION

Think of it as the MBTA’s version of Dominoes’ offer of free pizza if pies aren’t delivered within 30 minutes. To make up for trains that were often at least that late — and sometimes never came at all — MBTA service will be free on April 24 and monthly and weekly pass buyers will get a 15 percent discount in May.

CommonWealth examines the T’s debt problem. Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute and Rep. William Straus take on the T’s problems on Broadside.

MARATHON BOMBING TRIAL

The Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial turns to the killing of MIT police officer Sean Collier, with surveillance video that appears to show the assassination, and gruesome testimony from officers who rushed to his side and from an MIT graduate student who was bicycling that night  and identified Tsarnaev in court as the person he saw leaning against Collier’s cruiser just after the shooting apparently took place.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

A Lawrence court officer accused of raping a female prisoner kept a phone filled with pornography inside the courtroom, the Eagle-Tribune reports.

MEDIA

Columbia University’s famed graduate school of journalism is cutting enrollment and staff, Romenesko reports.

The CEO of the Newspaper Association of America is making $632,845 a year, Romenesko reports.

Alabama officials are investigating a complaint of elder abuse involving To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee arising from the anticipated publication of her second novel.