2002 DC Beltway Sniper Case Ends?

[MinM]

ABC News has learned authorities are increasingly concerned that a man sought in connection with a bizarre shooting incident on the Washington Mall last week may pose a threat to President Obama.

The Secret Service now suspects that a bullet fired in this incident may have hit the White House after a bullet round was found in a White House window, though the round had not yet been conclusively linked to the incident. The round was stopped by ballistic glass behind the historic exterior glass, while an additional round has been found on the exterior of the White House.

Police believe the suspect, 21-year-old Oscar Ramiro Ortega of Idaho, is mentally ill. Ortega has an extensive record, ranging from domestic violence to drug charges. Sources say a police investigation has uncovered evidence suggesting Ortega has a fixation on the White House.

At 9:30 p.m. Friday, police received reports of shots fired in the bustling area of 16th street and Constitution Ave.

Authorities would later find a car in the area. The suspect had fled, but what police discovered inside the vehicle left them deeply concerned: an assault style rifle and empty shell casings.

Police linked the car to Ortega and have been hunting him ever since.

It’s unclear whether Ortega is capable of launching a sophisticated attack, but police are still fearful of what he might do next.

Authorities suspect Ortega has been in the area for weeks, coming back and forth to the Washington Mall. Before the shooting, he was detained by local police at an abandoned house. U.S. Park police say Ortega may have spent time blending in with Occupy D.C. protesters.

President Obama, who is currently on a visit to Australia, was not present at the White House at the time of the incident, and in fact has been out of town for the past week. Secret Service officials are not taking any chances with the security of the President and the White House, though, and want Ortega off the street.

http://news.yahoo.com/dc-shooting-suspe ... 05229.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45319372/ns ... -arrested/

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Bumping to read tomorrow.

[seemslikeadream]

'Like A Duck In A Noose' - CBS News

"You have indicated that you want us to do and say certain things. You've asked us to say ... We understand that hearing us say this is important to you ...",

"We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose."

This was the public statement from Montgomery Country Police Chief - Charles Moose.

This odd public statement is actually a hypnotic cue or "trigger" that was used to let the shooter know it was time to turn himself in. In return...the killer followed hearing this message by pulling off the road...placing his wallet on the hood of the car...and going to sleep.

This is not radical Islam but...rather...mind control experimentation by the CIA in conjunction with the military. Much like the "lone assassin" currently responsible for the Fort Hood shootings.

People need to understand this and why these kind of things keep happening.

Cut-outs, moles, patsies and provocateurs

Federal judge orders re-sentencing for D.C. sniper Lee Boyd Malvo

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Friday, May 26, 2017, 6:59 PM
A federal judge on Friday tossed out two life sentences for one of Virginia’s most notorious criminals, sniper Lee Boyd Malvo, and ordered Virginia courts to hold new sentencing hearings.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson in Norfolk said Malvo is entitled to new sentencing hearings after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional.

Malvo was 17 when he was arrested in 2002 for a series of shootings that killed 10 people and wounded three over a three-week span in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, causing widespread fear throughout the region.

His accomplice, John Allen Muhammad, was executed in 2009.

Series of shootings on Kansas City highways leave 3 injured
Malvo also was sentenced to life in prison in Maryland for the murders that occurred there. But his lawyers have made an appeal on similar grounds in that state.

A hearing is scheduled in June. Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh, who helped prosecute Malvo in 2003, said the Virginia attorney general can appeal Jackson’s ruling.

If not, Morrogh said he would pursue another life sentence, saying he believes Malvo meets the criteria for a harsh sentence.

Michael Kelly, spokesman for Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, said Friday evening that the office is “reviewing the decision and will do everything possible, including a possible appeal, to make sure this convicted mass murderer serves the life sentences that were originally imposed.”

He also noted that the convictions themselves stand and emphasized that, even if

Malvo gets a new sentencing hearing, he could still be resentenced to a life term. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. Then, last year, the Supreme Court applied that case retroactively to sentences issued before 2012.


Sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo enters a courtroom in the Spotsylvania, Va. in 2004. (MIKE MORONES/AP)
Malvo’s first trial took place in Chesapeake after a judge agreed to move it from Fairfax because of pretrial publicity. A jury convicted

Malvo of capital murder for the slaying of FBI analyst Linda Franklin, who was shot in the head outside a Home Depot store. Under Virginia law, a capital murder conviction requires either a death sentence or life without parole. Prosecutors sought a death sentence, but a jury opted for life in prison.

Malvo then negotiated a plea bargain in Spotsylvania County and agreed to a life sentence and waived his appeal rights.

The attorney general’s office argued unsuccessfully that the Supreme Court rulings should not apply to Malvo.

To begin with, while the jury in Chesapeake had only the option of a death penalty or life without parole, the capital murder statute required them to make specific findings about Malvo, including a conclusion that he poses a future danger.

The state argued that the jury’s findings provide the kind of individualized assessment that the Supreme Court requires to sentence a juvenile to life in prison.

The state also argued that Malvo knowingly waived his appeal rights when he struck the plea bargain in Spotsylvania County. Jackson, in his ruling, wrote that Malvo was entitled to a new sentencing hearing because the Supreme Court’s ruling grants new rights to juveniles that Malvo didn’t know he had when he agreed to the plea bargain.

Malvo has been serving his sentence at Red Onion state prison in southwest Virginia.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3199239

[seemslikeadream]

Supreme Court agrees to take up DC sniper case

(2012) DC sniper 10 years on: 'I was a monster'
Washington (CNN)The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up a case concerning Lee Boyd Malvo, who was convicted for his role in the sniper shooting spree that took place in the Washington, DC, area in 2002.

Malvo is currently serving life without parole. A lower court ruled that he must be re-sentenced because he was only 17 when the crimes were committed.

DC sniper to be resentenced after judge overturns life-without-parole rulings
Virginia is seeking to appeal that ruling. The state argues that Court precedent only applies when there is a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

Malvo, who is now 34 years old, was one of two people convicted in the sniper attacks that took place in 2002 in Maryland, Virginia and DC and left 10 dead. His partner in the shootings, John Allen Muhammad, was executed in November 2009 in Virginia for his part in the spree.

In one of his Virginia trials, Malvo used an insanity defense, alleging that Muhammad had brainwashed him into committing murder. He also originally claimed to be the triggerman in all of the shootings, but later said that Muhammad was the shooter in all but the last one.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/18/politics ... index.html

[Grizzly]

^^^ Freeze, hold and thaw. It's a game. And we are the pieces/pawns.

[seemslikeadream]

I miss you so much MinMn

The Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment is in grave danger from the Supreme Court
With Kennedy gone, the Supreme Court’s already rethinking the Eighth Amendment.

Ian Millhiser
Oct 16, 2019, 8:00am EDT

There probably isn’t much doubt how Mathena v. Malvo, a case the Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday, will wind up being resolved.

The “Malvo” in this case is Lee Boyd Malvo, one half of the infamous pair of serial killers who terrorized the Washington, DC area with a sniper rampage in 2002. He was 17 at the time of the rampage, and he claims that the sentencing courts did not follow the proper process for condemning a juvenile offender to life without parole — though it’s doubtful that a majority of the Court will agree with him.

Several of the justices lived in the DC area during the three-week period when residents were scared to go outside for fear that they would be killed by Malvo and his partner, John Allen Muhammad. Malvo’s legal arguments rest on a fairly aggressive reading of a 2012 Supreme Court decision that split the Court 5-4. Notably, former Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the key fifth vote in that decision.

But even in the likely event that Malvo loses, it matters a great deal how Malvo loses. Malvo claims that he was sentenced in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments.” And the Supreme Court signaled just a few months ago that it wants to dramatically roll back the scope of that amendment.

Last April, in Bucklew v. Precythe, the Supreme Court signaled that it plans a wholesale rethinking of how it understands the Eighth Amendment. Malvo is the Court’s first Eighth Amendment case since Bucklew, so it could offer a window into just how deeply the Court’s Republican majority plans to cut into the shield against bizarre and excessive punishments.

Malvo could prove to be a fairly minor case, which simply states that the Court will not apply its 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama — which held that “the Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile offenders” — in the specific way that Malvo seeks. In theory, the case could also end in a victory for Malvo, although that outcome seems unlikely.

What makes this case significant, however, is that it could be the second phase of the doctrinal revolution that the Court began in Bucklew — and it could signal that criminal defendants enjoy far fewer protections against cruel and unusual punishments than they do under existing law.

The Eighth Amendment’s decay began four years ago, as part of an effort to save the death penalty

Bucklew is, at once, one of the most ghoulish cases ever to reach the Supreme Court, and one of the most significant opinions of the Roberts era.

The case involved Russell Bucklew, a death row inmate with cavernous hemangioma, a disease “which causes vascular tumors — clumps of blood vessels — to grow in his head, neck, and throat.” Bucklew feared that the lethal dose of barbiturates the state of Missouri planned to give him at his execution would cause him to choke on his own tumors, leading to extreme pain and suffering in his final minutes.

In effect, Bucklew’s claim was that the Eighth Amendment did not allow him to be tortured to death.

Realistically, Bucklew’s case was doomed long before it arrived at the Supreme Court. In Glossip v. Gross (2015), a 5-4 Court held that the death penalty enjoys a kind of super-legal status. In the lead up to Glossip, several manufacturers of drugs commonly used in executions refused to sell them to states that intended to use them to kill someone. Some of those states responded by using painkillers of dubious reliability to execute prisoners. As Justice Elena Kagan warned in her Glossip dissent, the drug cocktails used by these states could cause people to experience “the feeling of being burned alive” during their execution.

And yet all five of the Court’s Republican appointees, including Kennedy, joined an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that suggested that the death penalty must be defended against drug companies that seek to undercut it. “Because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional,” Alito wrote, “‘[i]t necessarily follows that there must be a [constitutional] means of carrying it out.’”

If an inmate believed that a particular method would be painful, or even torturous, the burden was on that inmate to propose a different method of execution that would cause less pain.

Bucklew rewrote decades of constitutional law

Glossip, however, did not provide much of a theoretical framework to justify its result. It largely began with the premise that the death penalty must be allowed, and then reasoned from that conclusion. Bucklew, which was decided after Kennedy left the Court, was the Court’s first attempt to put some doctrinal heft behind Glossip’s defense of executions. But the theory of the Eighth Amendment articulated in Bucklew is at odds with decades of settled law.

Recall that the Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishments. In a seminal 1958 opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren argued that the amendment bans punishments that defy “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Thus, as a particular form of punishment grows more and more “unusual,” it grows more and more constitutionally suspect.

If taken seriously, Warren’s framework is an existential threat to the death penalty itself. As the Death Penalty Information Center chronicles, both new death sentences and actual executions are disappearing in most of the country.

Death Penalty Information Center
Only eight states conducted executions in 2018, with Texas accounting for more than half (13) of the 25 total executions.

Rather than follow Warren’s reasoning to its end point, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Bucklew simply ignores the “evolving standards of decency” framework altogether. Instead, Gorsuch suggests that the scope of the Eighth Amendment was defined in the eighteenth century and that it may never change.

“Death was ‘the standard penalty for all serious crimes’ at the time of the founding,” Gorsuch writes. “Nor did the later addition of the Eighth Amendment outlaw the practice. On the contrary — the Fifth Amendment, added to the Constitution at the same time as the Eighth, expressly contemplates that a defendant may be tried for a ‘capital’ crime and ‘deprived of life’ as a penalty, so long as proper procedures are followed.”

Gorsuch does list some methods of execution — “dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive” — that do violate the Eighth Amendment. But what sets these punishments aside is the fact that “by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become ‘unusual.’”

Bucklew did not explicitly overrule the “evolving standards of decency” test, but it is impossible to square Gorsuch’s framework with Warren’s. Warren read the Eighth Amendment as a restriction on punishments that are “unusual” at the time when they are imposed, but Gorsuch reads the amendment to only ban punishments that were “unusual” in 1791.

The open question is how far Bucklew will go

If the Court follows Gorsuch’s new test to its logical extreme, the consequences would be quite dire for criminal defendants. Though Kennedy joined Alito’s opinion in Glossip, the former swing justice frequently voted with his liberal colleagues in cases asking whether especially harsh punishments could be applied to people that Kennedy believed to have diminished mental capacity.

Thus, in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), Kennedy joined an opinion holding that the death penalty could not be applied to intellectually disabled offenders. He reached a similar conclusion in Roper v. Simmons (2005), which held that the Constitution forbids “imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed.” And, in Miller v. Alabama (2012), Kennedy joined a decision holding that “the Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile offenders.”

All three of these opinions, however, rested on the “evolving standards of decency” framework that the Court appeared to scrap in Bucklew. And thus, all of them could potentially be on the chopping block now that Kennedy is no longer around to protect them.

Which brings us back to Malvo. Malvo, who was 17 during his 2002 sniping rampage, argues for a broad reading of Miller. Under his reading of the decision, “Miller requires not only that sentencers be permitted to consider youth, but also that they actually do so, to determine whether life without parole is a proportionate sentence.” Thus, Malvo claims his sentence was invalid because the sentencing judge did not consider Malvo’s youth at the time of the offense.

The state, for its part, argues that Miller only forbids “mandatory” schemes that automatically apply a sentence of life without parole to certain juvenile offenders.

If Kennedy were still on the Court, Malvo’s argument might have a shot. But it is unlikely to prevail in the current Supreme Court. The best criminal justice reformers can realistically hope for is a decision rejecting Malvo’s reading of Miller and embracing the state’s.

Malvo, however, could go much further than that. It could potentially apply Bucklew’s new framework to overrule Miller itself. And it could cast other decisions like Atkins and Roper into grave doubt. Malvo, in other words, could tell us whether Bucklew was simply a one-off effort to come up with a doctrinal justification for the death penalty, or whether it was the beginning of a constitutional revolution.

And if the revolution is upon us, states could gain broad new powers to impose punishments that are now widely viewed as cruel and unusual. In a famous 1988 lecture, Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that “public flogging” was a permissible punishment at the time of the framing, though he labeled himself a “faint-hearted originalist” because he doubted that he would uphold an attempt to flog a criminal offender.

Indeed, it is doubtful that Gorsuch’s view of the Eighth Amendment would prevent such public inflictions of pain. Britain did not abolish “the punishment of whipping” until 1948, a fairly convincing sign that this punishment was acceptable to the former English colonists that founded the United States. The Delaware Supreme Court upheld statutes imposing “the penalty of lashes” as recently as 1963.

The Court already held, in Glossip and Bucklew, that an inmate may be tortured to death, at least in effect, if not necessarily in intent. The scope of the Eighth Amendment is now in the hands of judges who believe that such punishment is acceptable.
https://www.vox.com/2019/10/16/20914289 ... boyd-malvo

The Supreme Court Needs to Change the Way It Thinks About Justice for Children

There’s another obvious difference between children and adults.

Gideon Yaffe
Oct 16, 201910:55 AM
A girl with her hands cuffed behind her back.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Igor Vershinsky/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
Over the past 20 years, the Supreme Court has set significant limits on how severely juveniles can be punished for serious crimes. Wednesday, the court is hearing arguments in a case that will determine whether the trend toward leniency continues, as it should, or is cut short.

In recent years, the court has ruled that the Constitution bars not only death sentences for children who commit murder but also sentences of life without parole for terrible crimes that fall short of homicide. The court’s reasoning is uncomplicated: People younger than 18 are too immature to be fully responsible for their crimes. But there’s a flaw in that rationale that might provide an opening for the court’s conservatives to exploit.

The court’s 2012 step toward leniency, Miller v. Alabama, created some confusion. In Miller, the court ruled that a mandatory sentence of life without parole is unconstitutional for someone who was under 18 at the time of the offense—even if that offense was a horrific murder. This decision left unanswered questions: Was the court unhappy about the mandatory nature of the sentence—about denying judges the discretion to impose lighter penalties? Or did the court believe that a sentence of life without parole was excessive for any kid, whether or not the judge had a choice about imposing that sentence?

The new case will settle these questions, and it involves one of the most notorious murder sprees in our nation’s history. Lee Boyd Malvo, in thrall to a father figure named John Muhammad, participated in killing 17 people and severely injuring another 10 in a cross-country crime spree culminating in the so-called “Beltway sniper” attacks in October 2002. Unlike Muhammad, Malvo escaped execution thanks to his age: He was 17 at the time of the crimes. Although the judge had discretion to impose a lesser penalty, he instead chose to sentence Malvo to life without parole. The question before the Supreme Court now is whether Malvo’s discretionary sentence of life without parole is unconstitutional. The stakes are high for those hundreds of people who committed murder as kids and are now serving discretionary sentences of life without parole.

As a matter of conscience, nobody should favor a sentence of life without parole for a child, no matter what that child has done. As juvenile advocates often say, life without parole sentences a child to die in prison. That we continue to impose such punishments on children puts us at odds with every nation whose criminal justice policies we should emulate.

Criminal punishment is government work.
But an empirical fallacy mars the reasoning that has driven the Supreme Court toward leniency in juvenile sentencing: The psychology and neuroscience of adolescent development show that normal 17-year-olds are little different from a large percentage of people in their early 20s. No evidence at all suggests that Malvo was less mature when he committed his atrocious crimes than the average 18-year-old, who remains eligible for the harshest penalties. Add that those who commit murder in their early 20s tend to be much less mature than their agemates in the general population, and the maturity-based argument for leniency gets even shakier. If it is immaturity that warrants leniency, but 22-year-olds who commit heinous crimes are sufficiently mature to be given sentences of life without parole, then there is no reason to be lenient to a normal 17-year-old like Malvo. We run the risk of watching the court’s conservative majority follow this reasoning off the moral cliff and rule that Malvo’s sentence comports with the Constitution.

There is another way. The court should instead build its case for leniency on a bright-line difference between children and adults: Children lack the rights to political participation that adults enjoy. Children lack the vote, and their right to freedom of speech is severely curtailed. The same government that gives parents the right to prevent their children from attending political rallies aimed at shaping the law denies anyone the right to curtail adult participation in such events. Yet voting and speaking out are the two primary means of exerting influence over the law.

Children’s diminished political rights matter in criminal-sentencing decisions because criminal punishment is government work. In a democracy, the primary reason the government is allowed to make you do things you would prefer to avoid is that you have a say over what the government does. This idea undergirds the rallying cry, “No taxation without representation!” But children do not have a say. Our political system treats them as, literally, second-class citizens: They get some but not all of a first-class citizen’s rights to participation. But then it follows that they should get some but not all of a first-class citizen’s government-imposed burdens. Chief among these burdens is subjection to a full helping of punishment for criminal conduct.

Children are importantly different from other people denied the vote. Unlike visitors to our country, children have no other political home, and they did not choose to come here and make themselves subject to our laws. Unlike the severely mentally disabled, all but the youngest children can make voting decisions as competently as many adult voters do. It is true that many jurisdictions in our country deny the franchise to felons, as well. But that doesn’t mean we should treat children as we treat felons—holding both groups fully criminally responsible while simultaneously denying them the vote. The right remedy is to enfranchise felons.

None of this implies that immaturity is irrelevant to criminal responsibility. Where an offender was reduced in maturity and thus in culpability, a judge should be more lenient. But judges should not have the option of giving adult punishments to people denied an adult’s right to exert influence over the law—even if the judge believes that the person is well-equipped to exert such influence.

Malvo deserves a more lenient sentence than the one he received. There is room for both the left and the right wings of the court to unite in recognizing this simple conclusion, a conclusion grounded not in the psychological meaning of age but in its political meaning.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... iency.html