Malvo Is Spared Execution

A jury Tuesday rejected the death penalty for sniper Lee Boyd Malvo, recommending instead that the teenage gunman be sentenced to life in prison without parole for a spree of random attacks that killed 10 people last year in the Washington, D.C., area.

The jurors -- eight women and four men, including a minister, a mechanic, a retired teacher and a homemaker -- deliberated for nearly nine hours over two days, weighing testimony from 139 witnesses before agreeing on the sentence, which included a $200,000 fine. The same jurors had convicted Malvo of capital murder Thursday.

When Circuit Judge Jane Marum Roush was informed the jury had reached a decision, Malvo was led into the courtroom by three sheriff’s deputies. Wearing a blue knit sweater and slacks, the 5-foot-3, 120-pound defendant looked much younger than his 18 years. He sat frowning and turned his head away from the jurors as the recommendation was read, but otherwise showed no emotion.

The jury agreed that the two required stipulations to render a death sentence had been met: Malvo represented a future threat to society, and his crimes were so “outrageously vile” as to represent a depravity of mind. But in the end, prosecution and defense attorneys said, the jurors considered the mitigating factors of Malvo’s youth and his troubled childhood -- and they spared his life.

“I’m not happy with it,” prosecutor Robert Horan said of the sentence. “But I think: A: His lawyers did a good job; and B: Malvo’s lucky he looks a lot younger than he is. You could make the ‘child’ argument with him, and his lawyers did.” Horan also indicated that the timing of the deliberations had influenced the jury. “We used to have a theory when I was a very young prosecutor that whatever you do, don’t try one on Christmas week,” Horan said.

Malvo’s attorney, Craig Cooley, appeared to wipe away tears when Roush read the jury’s decision. Although he was relieved, Cooley said, “there’s not a lot [of] joy in this, no matter what the result. A lot of families are still in pain, and Lee is going to spend the rest of his life in prison.”

According to his taped confession, Malvo was part of a two-man sniper team that traveled with walkie-talkies, a global positioning device and a .232-caliber Bushmaster rifle, selecting target areas and lying in ambush for human targets that entered their “killing zone.”

His accomplice, John Allen Muhammad, 42, was found guilty of capital murder last month in a trial in Virginia Beach, Va. His jury recommended the death penalty, a decision that, like the sentence in Malvo’s trial, must be confirmed by the presiding judge during formal sentencing early next year.

Both snipers still could be tried in other shootings and could get the death penalty.

Throughout Malvo’s 29-day trial, more than a dozen members of the victims’ families sat quietly in three rows behind the defendant. Some expressed disappointment Tuesday at the jury’s recommendation.

“I’m not at all pleased,” said Paul LaRuffa, who was shot five times by Malvo but was one of three victims to survive. “I don’t think what he did was any less than what Muhammad did.”

“I wish he’d gotten death,” said Vijay Walekar, whose brother was fatally shot while pumping gas. “We’ve sat here day after day for six weeks and, well, all I can say is I’m very disappointed.”

Horan, the prosecutor, had argued vigorously for the death penalty, quoting Robert Louis Stevenson in his closing argument: “In each of us, two natures are at war -- the good and the evil. In our hands lies the power to choose what we want most to be.” He told jurors that Malvo chose to kill.

But Cooley, countering for the defense, offered as mitigation Malvo’s troubled childhood. The teenager, he said, had fallen “under the spell” of an evil and militaristic Muhammad, a Gulf War veteran. “The acts were despicable; the child is not,” he told jurors. “Certainly every child has good within them. Every person is redeemable.”

Although Virginia is one of 16 states that allows the execution of murderers as young as 16, juries here and elsewhere have grown increasingly reluctant to sentence juvenile offenders to death. Only two such sentences were handed down nationally last year.

Malvo, a Jamaican emigre, and Muhammad met by chance in late 2000 in an electronics shop on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Their wanderings took them to Florida, then to Washington state, where Muhammad shaped a plan: They were “going to carry out a sniper plan, to start shooting people one after the other,” he told Malvo, according to court testimony.

The itinerant gunmen left a bloody trail across the country as they headed east in fall 2002 in a battered 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, the trunk of which had been converted into a shooter’s platform. Including the sniper attacks in the Washington-D.C. area, Malvo and Muhammad have been charged with or linked to more than 20 shootings that left 15 dead and seven wounded in seven states and the nation’s capital.

On the first day of sniper attacks in Washington and suburban Maryland, Oct. 3, 2002, five people were killed at random within hours of each other. Fear gripped the region as the killings continued -- sporting events were canceled, schools kept children inside during recesses -- and didn’t subside until the snipers were captured three weeks later, sleeping in the Caprice at a Maryland highway rest stop.

Although their motive was not clearly established during the two trials, testimony indicated the snipers seethed with rage over racial injustices. They believed the government would meet their demand for $10 million to stop the killings, and they intended to use the money to set up a Utopian black colony in Canada, according to court testimony.