Seven years ago this month, the captured Beltway snipers -- John Allen Muhammad, 41, and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, 17 -- were in federal custody, accused of 16 shootings and 10 murders. They had set out to create a reign of terror in the Washington area to match the 9/11 attacks of the year before.
U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft had a choice: He could send them to be tried in Maryland, where most of the murders took place, but where the death penalty was on hold because of the specter of racial unfairness. Or he could send them across the Potomac River to Virginia, the site of three of the killings and where death sentences are carried out swiftly.
Ashcroft chose Virginia.
On Tuesday, Muhammad is scheduled to die by lethal injection in a Virginia prison, his initial appeals having been dismissed by state and federal judges.
"History has borne out the attorney general made the right call," said Mark Corallo, his spokesman at the time. "These crimes were so brutally coldblooded and calculated."
Muhammad's new lawyers lodged a last set of emergency appeals with the Supreme Court early last week. Their main claim is the case has moved too quickly. They said judges in Virginia cut short the time for filing appeals and refused to hold a single hearing after the trial.
Jonathan Sheldon, Muhammad's current lawyer, describes his client as mentally ill. "He is delusional, paranoid and incompetent. He was angry at the government after he came back from the Gulf War. And he has delusions of racist conspiracies," Sheldon said.
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