"Hang em High!" Birmingham News
Alabama wants to execute Malvo
01/04/04
CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer
Alabama has more juvenile offenders on Death Row than any state except Texas. Authorities in Montgomery are hoping to add one more to the list - Lee Boyd Malvo.
Recently convicted of a sniper killing, Malvo was spared the death penalty by a Virginia jury, which opted for a life-without-parole sentence.
Last week, Montgomery County District Attorney Ellen Brooks sent a request to Virginia authorities for Malvo's next trial to be in Alabama.
"I think the mood in Montgomery is overwhelmingly for the death penalty in cases like this," said Montgomery Police Chief John Wilson. "This business about being this little baby-faced 17-year-old boy that didn't have any idea what he was doing - that gets nowhere."
No decision has been made on Malvo's next trial. Efforts to reach Brooks last week failed.
If an Alabama jury convicts Malvo of capital murder, it's unlikely he would die for his crimes since the state hasn't executed a juvenile in 43 years, according to a law professor who studies the death penalty for juveniles.
"Given Alabama's record, there's really no chance he'd be executed," said Victor Streib, a professor at Ohio Northern University who writes reports on the juvenile death penalty and tracks cases dating to 1973.
With 13 people who committed crimes as youths on Death Row, Alabama has the second largest juvenile Death Row. Texas, with a population six times larger than Alabama, has 28 juvenile offenders awaiting executions.
Another estimated two dozen to three dozen Alabama juveniles have been indicted on capital charges and are facing trials, said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based nonprofit law firm that represents indigent defendants.
Despite the numbers, Alabama courts have an unstable relationship with the juvenile death penalty. Numerous sentences are overturned. The last execution of a juvenile offender in Alabama was in 1961. And all 11 juveniles executed in Alabama since the 1800s have been black, their victims white.
"It's not some percentage. All of them were black. All of them had white victims," Streib said. "When I see a state that's 100 percent executing black offenders for white victims, that's unusual, so one worries about that."
May ignite debate
Malvo was 17 when he and his mentor, Desert Storm veteran John Allen Muhammad, were arrested in a multistate killing spree that left 13 people dead, wounded six and paralyzed the Washington area in 2002.
Soon after, they were indicted on capital murder charges in the shooting death of Claudine Parker, 52, and the wounding of Kellie Adams, employees of a Montgomery liquor store.
A trial in Montgomery would likely renew the discussion of the appropriateness of a death sentence for someone too young to legally vote or smoke - and who already will spend the rest of his life in prison.
Stevenson said people tend to minimize the impact of a life-without-parole sentence for a teenager. "Lee Malvo will die in prison.
"If you believe in our system of justice, the community has spoken about whether he should get the death penalty," Stevenson said. "To spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for criminal proceedings in Alabama just for the chance of the possibility that he might get the death sentence strikes me as wasteful and gratuitous."
A wiser use of the money would be services for victims, he said.
States stand alone
Streib said a steady decline in juvenile death sentences nationwide places Texas and Alabama out of the mainstream. "It's nearly disappeared now," Streib said.
A handful of other countries execute juveniles. In recent history those have included Iran, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Death penalty supporters say the sniper case cries out for society's most severe punishment. They say juveniles, such as Malvo, are often the most callous, remorseless killers. Their crimes are among the worst and the punishment should match.
Clay Crenshaw, chief of the capital crimes division in the Alabama attorney general's office, pointed out the case of Timothy Davis, on Alabama's Death Row since 1980.
"Tim Davis was 17 years old, and he sodomized a 69-year-old woman and stabbed her in the back 17 times, and robbed her to make a motorcycle payment," Crenshaw said. "I don't see any reason to exempt him from the death penalty just because he was 17 years old, and in that particular case he was married and had a job and was carrying on like an adult."
Crenshaw said Alabamians continue to support capital punishment for juveniles. "I certainly don't hear anything from the public or any kind of movement to exempt 16- or 17-year-old capital murderers from the death penalty," he said. "I think the only people arguing for that are anti-death penalty advocates."
Malvo's fellow sniper Muhammad was sentenced to death in Virginia.
Wrong signal
Wilson, the Montgomery police chief, said Alabama's strategy has been based on whether each man gets two death sentences, in case one is overturned.
"You always want to have two eggs in your basket in case you break one," Wilson said.
Likely, Virginia used its strongest case against Malvo first and yet did not get a death sentence, Wilson said. The next case may be weaker, he said, intensifying his interest in trying the teen in Alabama.
"We have probably some of the strongest evidence of all the cases," he said. "We can put him right at the scene with the bodies."
Wilson acknowledges an Alabama trial would be tremendously costly. But he believes it is critical to prevent copycat killings.
"Somebody planted a seed in this young man's head, he was manipulated," Wilson said.
The message was that if a juvenile got caught, the penalty would not be as severe, Wilson said. "I don't want that message to get out."
High reversal rate
Nationwide, when a death sentence is handed down for a youth, it's unlikely to be carried out. The reversal rate in these cases is 86 percent.
Of 24 juvenile death sentences handed down in Alabama since 1978, according to Streib's research, 10 have been reversed and one commuted to life.
Generally reversals come, as in adult cases, when appeals courts find mistakes in the case or shoddy defense attorney work.
Streib pointed out one exception. After the U.S. Supreme Court barred executing juveniles younger than 16, Clayton Joel Flowers was sentenced to death in 1990 in Baldwin County for a crime committed at age 15. His sentence was found unconstitutional and reversed shortly thereafter.
"There's no way that case is in the ballpark," Streib said. "There is sort of a sense of, `I'll show that Supreme Court in Washington.'"
More recently, the Alabama Supreme Court in 2002 overturned the death sentence of Taurus Carroll, convicted of shooting Bettie Long to death in a Birmingham laundry. Her family and the jury recommended life, but a Jefferson County judge sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court said the sentence was excessive.
Bad scenario
While Malvo and Muhammad are allegedly linked to one death and one shooting in Alabama, the pair terrorized a region. "If this is not the worst case scenario, I don't know what is," Wilson said.
However, the area most affected by the shooting rampage may lack the will to execute a teenager. Maryland has a moratorium on the death penalty to study its fairness. The District of Columbia has no death penalty, for adults or juveniles. And Virginia's strongest case failed to yield a death sentence for Malvo.
"If death wasn't appropriate there, it would be inappropriate here," Stevenson said.
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