Supreme Court Hears Case of Lee Malvo, Sniper Who Terrorized D.C.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/us/supreme-court-dc-sniper-lee-malvo.html

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WASHINGTON — Almost two decades after two men terrorized the Washington region in the fall of 2002 in a series of deadly sniper attacks, the Supreme Court considered on Wednesday whether one of them, Lee Malvo, may challenge his sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

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

Mr. Malvo, now 34, was sentenced to life in prison by a judge in Virginia in 2004, before a series of Supreme Court decisions that limited harsh punishments for juvenile offenders. The questions for the justices in the case, Mathena v. Malvo, No. 18-217, were whether and how those decisions applied to Mr. Malvo.

A ruling from the Supreme Court in Mr. Malvo’s favor is unlikely to benefit him as a practical matter. He has also been sentenced to life without parole in Maryland after pleading guilty to six murders there and is challenging those sentences in a separate proceeding. In addition, he and Mr. Muhammad are suspected of killings in Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana and Washington State, and he could be charged with murder in those states. And a new sentencing in Virginia could reimpose a sentence of life without parole.

“We are nowhere near any prospect of being released,” said Danielle Spinelli, a lawyer for Mr. Malvo, said during arguments Wednesday.

But scores of other inmates who committed murders before they turned 18 could obtain new sentences if the court rules for Mr. Malvo.

Wednesday’s argument focused on what two Supreme Court decisions required. In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the court ruled that automatic life sentences for juvenile offenders violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The decision repeatedly criticized mandatory sentences, suggesting that ones in which judges could take account of the defendant’s age were permissible.

In Montgomery v. Louisiana in 2016, the court made the Miller decision retroactive. In the process, it seemed to read the Miller decision to bar life without parole not only for defendants who received mandatory sentences but also “for all but the rarest of juvenile offenders, those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility.”

Most states, Ms. Spinelli said, responded to the decisions by granting juvenile offenders new sentencing hearings or making them eligible for parole, affecting more than 2,000 inmates. In six states, she said, some 60 inmates, including Mr. Malvo, have not benefited from the court’s decisions.

Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the majority opinion in the Miller decision, said it and the Montgomery decision could be boiled down to two words: “Youth matters.”

“You have to consider youth,” she said, “in making these sorts of sentencing determinations.”

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was an active questioner, said the two rulings required judges to distinguish between “someone who’s merely immature as opposed to incorrigible.”

Toby J. Heytens, Virginia’s solicitor general, said Mr. Malvo’s sentence had not been mandatory, relying on a 2017 decision from the Virginia Supreme Court in a different case. Mr. Heytens acknowledged that Mr. Malvo’s jury in 2003 had been presented with a choice between the death penalty and life without parole, recommending the latter. But he said the judge could theoretically have imposed a lighter sentence.

Ms. Spinelli disputed that characterization, noting that her client was sentenced before the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders in 2005.

Last year, a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., ruled for Mr. Malvo, saying he was entitled to a new sentencing hearing.

“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 in the citizens of that community.”

“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,” Judge 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.”