McLEAN, Va. — A federal judge on Wednesday rejected an appeal from convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad, who was sentenced to death for masterminding a 2002 killing rampage in the Washington, D.C., region that left 10 people dead.
Muhammad, who lived in Tacoma and Bellingham before the sniper attacks and is now on death row in Virginia, claimed numerous errors at his 2003 trial. U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Va., rejected all of Muhammad’s challenges to his conviction and sentence.
The Virginia Supreme Court had already rejected Muhammad’s appeal. O’Grady’s order issued Wednesday lifts a stay of execution that had been in place while he considered the appeal, but Muhammad can appeal O’Grady’s ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.
Muhammad’s appellate lawyers didn’t immediately return a phone message and e-mails on Wednesday. They have argued that he should not have been allowed to serve as his own lawyer for part of the trial because of mental illness.
Specifically, appellate lawyers James Connell and Jonathan Sheldon argued that his trial lawyers knew enough about Muhammad’s mental illnesses and brain abnormalities that they should have convinced the trial judge to bar Muhammad from representing himself.
Muhammad surprised the court and his own lawyers at the outset of his trial by demanding to represent himself. He gave his own opening statement and cross-examined key witnesses for two days before relinquishing the case back to his trial lawyers, Peter Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro.
In a 36-page ruling, O’Grady said there is no evidence that Muhammad was incompetent and unable to represent himself.
“Muhammad was highly lucid and coherent during trial,” O’Grady wrote.
Muhammad also challenged the constitutionality of Virginia’s terrorism statutes, passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, under which he was prosecuted. Muhammad’s lawyers argued that the laws are impermissibly vague.
O’Grady ruled that the law’s meaning is clear, and that the sniper killings were a classic example of the kind of terrorism the statute targets.
Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were convicted for the random sniper attacks that left 10 people dead in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia and terrorized the nation’s capital region for three weeks in October 2002.
Malvo, who lived with Muhammad in Washington state and was viewed by acquaintances as his son, was sentenced to life in prison.
O’Grady also rejected claims that prosecutors violated their duties by failing to turn over certain evidence that could have helped the defense and that the judge should have allowed the defense to present evidence of Muhammad’s brutal childhood.
In May, Muhammad wrote a letter to prosecutors seeking to end all appeals “so that you can murder this innocent black man,” but he changed his mind a few days later.
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