Malvo Found Guilty of Murder in Sniper Spree

A jury Thursday convicted Lee Boyd Malvo of murder, rejecting the defense claim that he was insane when he acted as John Allen Muhammad’s accomplice during the sniper rampage that killed 10 people in the Washington, D.C., area last year.

After finding the 18-year-old guilty on two capital counts -- one for killing during a terrorist act and another for committing multiple murders in a three-year period -- the jurors were ordered by Fairfax County Judge Jane Marum Roush to return today for a sentencing hearing.

The seven women and five men, all from Chesapeake, returned their unanimous verdict after two days of deliberation following a 22-day trial. They spent 12 1/2 hours deliberating behind closed doors before convicting Malvo in the murder of FBI analyst Linda Franklin. He was also found guilty on conspiracy and firearms counts.

The verdict nearly completes a triumph for the two Virginia prosecution teams that devised the legal strategies and circumstantial cases designed to send Malvo and Muhammad to the state’s death chamber. Last month, a Virginia Beach, Va., jury recommended death for Muhammad; now the Chesapeake panel could recommend either execution or life imprisonment without parole for Malvo, a Jamaican emigre.

When jurors sent word Thursday afternoon to that they had reached a verdict, Malvo was led by deputies from his 9-by-13-foot cell and taken through a 300-yard-long underground tunnel connecting the Chesapeake jail and the courthouse.

Moments after the jury returned to the courtroom, the foreman, a minister, handed a bailiff the signed charging documents and then read each of the four verdicts in a soft, slightly faltering voice.

Wearing an oatmeal-colored sweater, a tense Malvo leaned forward in his seat at the defense table, as if he wanted to speak. Instead, as the foreman declared his guilt, Malvo’s jaws moved wordlessly, his lips slightly agape. When the foreman finished, Malvo’s mouth stilled. He sank back in his seat.

Bound by a judicial gag order, prosecutors and defense attorneys said nothing after the verdict.

A prosecution team led by Fairfax Commonwealth Atty. Robert Horan left the courthouse by a side entrance, while defense lawyers Michael Arif and Gerald Cooley swept past a brace of television cameras.

Only Bob Meyers, brother of sniper victim Dean Harold Meyers, reacted publicly. He said that relatives of the sniper victims “are extremely pleased with the verdict. We believe justice has been served.”

Malvo’s court-appointed attorneys called 45 witnesses -- including relatives, schoolmates from his native Jamaica and a team of mental-health experts -- to bolster the defense theory that the malleable teenager had been transformed by Muhammad from a lonely, impressionable youth into a cold-blooded sharpshooter.

Two psychologists testified for the defense that Malvo was temporarily insane during the sniper attacks in October 2002. They concluded Malvo had been effectively brainwashed by Muhammad, 42, a 1991 Gulf War veteran who acted as the teenager’s father and trained him in the use of firearms and steeled him for murder with racist tracts and violent video games.

But the defense could not overcome the damage of Malvo’s own words: three taped confessions he made to law enforcement officers shortly after his arrest saying he was the triggerman in all the Washington-area slayings.

In a devastating rebuttal, Horan also revealed letters Malvo wrote to a fellow inmate in the Fairfax County Detention Center explaining how he had foiled interrogators by deceit, lies and feigned stupidity.

Over 12 days of testimony, the defense sketched Malvo’s troubled life, from the broken home of his childhood to his fateful partnership with Muhammad that started in Washington state late in 2001 and ended with the sniper killings. His attorneys contended that the domineering Muhammad was the leader of a cult of two, so able to control Malvo’s mind that the teenager could not understand the consequences of his actions.

“Lee was taken over, completely and entirely by Muhammad,” Arif said in closing statements Tuesday. “Lee could no more separate himself from John Muhammad than you could separate from your shadow on a sunny day.” He said Malvo was Muhammad’s “puppet.”

Horan dismissed the defense’s contention that Malvo was temporarily insane and told jurors that “a difficult childhood is not a mental disease.” He said the well-planned attacks were the work of brutal assassins who clearly understood they were engaged in a terrible crime.

The attacks by the two-man sniper team so terrorized the nation’s capital and suburban Maryland and Virginia -- each victim was a stranger to the killers -- that sporting events were canceled, schoolchildren were kept inside during recesses and motorists shielded themselves behind gas pumps while fueling their vehicles.

The snipers were arrested Oct. 24, 2002, while sleeping in their battered 1990 Chevrolet Caprice at a Maryland highway rest stop. Much of the Malvo defense strategy was designed not to prove his innocence but to convince jurors his life should be spared. The defense admitted throughout the trial that Malvo was a participant in the attacks. In addition to his confessions, Malvo was tied to the killings by DNA and fingerprint evidence.

“Insanity as a plea is really a fallback to last resorts,” said James Oleson, a lawyer and criminologist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. “Jurors are suspicious of it. Insanity gets used in less then 1% of cases, and when it does get used, it usually doesn’t work.”

The penalty phase of the trial is expected to last at least two days. “What the defense has been angling for all along is the hope it can find one juror who believes there is something redeemable about Malvo’s life,” Oleson said.