Beltway sniper wins an appeal
Life sentences without parole for Malvo in four Virginia cases set aside
A federal appeals court agreed Thursday to throw out the four life sentences that Lee Boyd Malvo received for his role in the 2002 Beltway sniper shootings that occurred in Virginia when he was 17.
The unanimous ruling from the threejudge panel cited a Supreme Court decision in 2012 that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole are unconstitutional for juveniles. The court made that decision retroactive in 2016.
Barring an appeal to the Supreme Court, Malvo would face new sentencing hearings in two jurisdictions in Virginia. He pleaded guilty in Spotsylvania County and agreed to two life sentences without parole, and was convicted by a jury in Chesapeake and also sentenced to two life sentences.
All four sentences have been vacated; the murder convictions still stand.
Malvo, now 33, and John Allen Muhammad also killed six people in the Maryland suburbs of Washington during a threeweek period that terrorized the region. Muhammad was executed in Virginia in 2009. Malvo is being held at Red Onion State Prison in Wise County, Va.
Thursday’s ruling from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals does not apply to the six life sentences Malvo received after he pleaded guilty to six murder charges in Maryland. In August, a judge in Montgomery County upheld those sentences.
In the ruling in Virginia, the three judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals — Paul V. Niemeyer, Robert B. King and Albert Diaz — wrote that their conclusions were made “not with any satisfaction but to sustain the law.”
The judges made clear that the shootings “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 in the citizens of that community.”
The ruling said prosecutors sought penalties that at the time were “legally imposed with arguments that are not without substantial force.”
But they said the law is clear. “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.” The judges concluded: “As for Malvo, who knows but God how he will bear the future.”
Prosecutors also had sought the death penalty for Malvo in Fairfax County for a fatal shooting outside a Home Depot, but a jury in Chesapeake chose a life sentence. The proceeding was moved there because of pretrial publicity. Lee Boyd Malvo enters a courtroom in Spotsylvania, Va., where he agreed to two life sentences without parole. Those sentences and two others have been vacated.
The Virginia attorney general’s office argued that the Supreme Court ruling applies only to mandatory sentences and that the judge in Chesapeake had a choice to suspend some of Malvo’s life term. Malvo’s attorneys, Craig S. Cooley and Michael Arif, argued that the sentence imposed was mandatory because the jury had only two options: death or life without parole. The appellate court agreed with Malvo’s attorneys.
The state argued that because Malvo entered Alford pleas to two more shootings in Spotsylvania County, he had waived his right to appeal. In an Alford plea, a defendant acknowledges that there is enough evidence for a conviction. A judge then found him guilty. The appellate judges ruled that Malvo could not have waived a right that didn’t then exist.
The Supreme Court ruling stems from a 2012 case, Miller v. Alabama, in which the justices found that “sentencing a child to life without parole is excessive for all but ‘the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption.’ ”