"Supreme Court is asked to spare sniper," is the report in today's Washington Post. It's written by Maria Glod and Josh White.
Attorneys for sniper John Allen Muhammad, mastermind of the terrifying 2002 Washington area shooting spree, asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to halt their client's execution, saying he was paranoid and delusional during his trial.
Muhammad, 48, who teamed up with Lee Boyd Malvo, now 24, in a series of random shootings that left 10 people dead, suffers from mental illness and brain damage caused partly by childhood beatings, defense attorney Jonathan P. Sheldon and others on the defense team wrote.
As he prepared for his 2003 trial, Muhammad was "amnesic of the events surrounding the crimes" and thought he was being framed in an elaborate scheme, the attorneys wrote. He believed that he was a prophet and said Malvo discovered an herbal cure for AIDS. He also said the military had trained him in "urban warfare" at "secret schools." The attorneys said that because of Muhammad's brain damage, he has trouble following a logical line of thought and "lacks sufficient ability to distinguish truth from falsity."
The argument to the Supreme Court contends that attorneys Peter D. Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro were ineffective because they failed to object to Muhammad's demand to represent himself at trial. Had the pair argued that Muhammad's mental problems made him unfit to present his own defense, there is a "reasonable probability" that the judge would have found Muhammad incompetent to stand trial altogether, Sheldon wrote.
"Trial counsel knew that Muhammad had been diagnosed with severe mental illness, and personally observed Muhammad's struggle with severe psychiatric disorders prior to the start of the trial," the attorneys wrote. "Muhammad's trial attorneys had a duty to request a competency evaluation, and their failure to do so was unreasonable and below prevailing professional norms."
"Plea to delay execution in sniper case," is the title of Lyle Denniston's post at SCOTUS Blog.
Seeking to slow down the famed “rocket docket” in federal trial courts in Virginia, at least when a death-row inmate is testing his state conviction and sentence, attorneys for John Allen Muhammad asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to delay his execution and then hear and decide his challenges. Muhammad faces execution in one week, on Nov. 10, for a Manassas, Va., murder that was one of ten he and a youthful compansion allegedly carried out in a wave of 16 sniper shootings in the Washington area seven years ago.
Besides testing a practice in the Virginia federal district courts of shortening the time to file an initial federal habeas plea, Muhammad’s counsel are challenging lower courts’ rulings that he was not harmed legally by representing himself for part of his trial, even though lawyers advising him knew of evidence that would indicate he was not mentally competent to understand what was happening at the trial.
His stay application (09A423) is here. Along with it, he filed a petition for review (Muhammad v. Kelly, 09-7328). The papers were filed initially with Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., who is the Circuit Justice for emergency orders in the federal Fourth Circuit, which includes Virginia. He has the authority to act alone or share action with his colleages on the stay application. The full Court will consider the certiorari petition.
In seeking to put off the Nov. 10 execution, Muhammad’s attorneys argued that “Virginia is alone in its practice of always setting an execution date just prior to the Supreme Court’s consideration of a petition for a writ of certiorari from an appeal of a first habeas petition.” The application noted that Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg protested that practice two years ago. That complaint is separate from the challenge to the federal district courts’ refusal, on first habeas petitions like Muhammad’s, to allow the full year to file that is specified under federal law.
Because the execution date would fall 20 days before Muhammad’s petition would even be due in the Supreme Court under normal scheduling, his lawyers filed it at the same time as their stay application. The application argued that the Court should adopt as a routine practice the staying of all executions that a state schedules before the Supreme Court has a chance to complete review of a first federal habeas case.
Today's Allentown Morning Call, in Pennsylvania, carries an OpEd by Brian Gilmore, "D.C. sniper should not be executed." Gilmore is a writer for Progressive Media Project.
John Allen Muhammad, the infamous Washington sniper, should not be put to death.
But Muhammad will die on Nov. 10 by lethal injection. He will be executed under the laws of the state of Virginia. No one will save him. Not the U.S. Supreme Court. Not Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. Not President Obama. Each could do so but won't.
I understand why families of Muhammad's victims want him to die: He terrorized a city, he ruined lives and he destroyed futures. I was living in Washington at the time, and I can still recall my own fear for myself, my family and my friends that there was a random shooter on the loose.
But the justified anger of the victims' kin does not justify state-sponsored killing.
Capital punishment is morally wrong and irrational.
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