Washington-area sniper case will get a hearing

WASHINGTON >> The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Lee Malvo, the younger of the two men who terrorized the Washington region with sniper shootings in the fall of 2002, may challenge his sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The court also agreed to hear constitutional challenges to state laws allowing non-unanimous juries and barring the insanity defense.

Malvo, now 34, was 17 when he and John Allen Muhammad killed 10 people in sniper attacks in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Muhammad was sentenced to death, and he was executed in 2009.

Malvo was sentenced to life in prison by judges in both Virginia and Maryland. He challenged his Virginia sentences under Supreme Court decisions that limited life sentences for juvenile offenders.

The central legal issues in the case the Supreme Court agreed to hear, Mathena v. Malvo, No. 18217, was whether Malvo had been sentenced under a law that made a life sentence mandatory and whether the Supreme Court decisions applied retroactively to Malvo.

In June, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Virginia, ruled that Malvo was entitled to new sentencing hearings.

“To be clear,” Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote for the panel, “the crimes committed by Malvo and John Muhammad were the most heinous, random acts of premeditated violence conceivable, destroying lives and families and terrorizing the entire Washington, D.C., metropolitan area for over six weeks, instilling mortal fear daily.

“But Malvo was 17 years old when he committed the murders, and he now has the retroactive benefit of new constitutional rules that treat juveniles differently for sentencing,” Niemeyer wrote.

“We make this ruling not with any satisfaction but to sustain the law,” the judge concluded. “As for Malvo, who knows but God how he will bear the future.”