Abstract

A Killing Tradition

The author explores the likelihood that a Virginia court will order the execution of Lee Boyd Malvo for crimes he is accused of committing while a minor. When John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested in the Washington-area sniper case last year, Attorney General John Ashcroft began to push immediately for a trial in Virginia rather than Maryland. Besides his obvious partiality for a jurisdiction that executes prisoners in great numbers, Ashcroft may have known something about American legal history--namely, that Virginia has a historic tradition of executing minors, a tradition that began in the eighteenth century. Virginia also has the distinction of being the last state to execute a female minor, an African-American "wash girl" named, ironically, Virginia Christian. Despite a 1910 Virginia law that prohibited the death penalty for first-time juvenile felons, Christian received the ultimate punishment. Because of her race and her social position, her age did not protect her in the Old Dominion. All of this does not bode well for Malvo, a poor, emotionally impoverished black youngster who fits Virginia's historical template for execution. Although the defense team will undoubtedly have a strong case rooted in Malvo's dysfunctional family life and subsequent domination by a psychopathic adult, it will be an uphill struggle to rouse sympathy for him. Regardless of the documented horrors of any specific case, the juvenile death penalty is a "shameful practice," to use the words of Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. The United States is now the only country that continues to execute juveniles.