CrimLaw

Malvo:

(1) More of the pictures he drew:

click on any picture above to go to the article it is with

One of Malvo's attorneys, Michael S. Arif, said in an interview Tuesday -- before the judge overseeing Malvo's trial had issued a gag order -- that many of the drawings were done when the teenager was held in isolation at the jail and that the issues he focused on, such as racism, were embedded in his mind by Muhammad, who was convicted and sentenced to death for a sniper slaying.

"Muhammad was off center and felt victimized by white society," Arif said. "Lee is a Jamaican, not an African American. This is not his fight. It was Muhammad's fight, if there was a fight to be had."

The pictures may also indicate what this paper calls "the Matrix Defense." Shockingly, the prosecutor just doesn't believe:

"How many million people have seen this movie and how many have committed murder?" asked Horan rhetorically during a Boston Globe interview.

Of course, the fact that millions of people have seen something and reacted differently than a single insane person did would not seem to be particularly relevant because they were sane.

(2) Here's the letter Malvo wrote which the judge did not allow into evidence.

(3) The publishing of the letter was one of the reasons the judge has now imposed a gag order on the attorneys.

In court Thursday, the judge questioned the prosecutors and defense attorneys in the case, and all told her they did not leak the letter.

Roush also said she was "disturbed" by the daily news conferences defense attorneys had been holding after court.

"I'm going to enter a gag order because I am increasingly disturbed by this. I think it's an attempt to reach the jurors or the jurors' families," Roush said. "No more talking to the papers, no more having press conferences."

(4) There was a fuss over the expert witnesses that the Defense started to put on yesterday:

Robert F. Horan Jr., the lead prosecutor, argued that some of the experts should not be allowed to testify at all and sought to limit the testimony of others. He told the judge that none of the experts the defense presented or proposed to present could say Mr. Malvo was insane in a legal sense.

"We have an insanity defense that's like a puff of smoke," Mr. Horan said. "There is no real claim that he was insane under Virginia law."

The most defense experts had concluded in their pretrial reports, Mr. Horan said, was that Mr. Malvo's ability to tell right from wrong was "severely impaired." That was not enough, he said.

Judge Jane Marum Roush, in a comment from the bench, agreed with Mr. Horan's description of the legal standard but still allowed the defense's first three expert witnesses to testify.

Judge Roush said the insanity defense required proof that Mr. Malvo was categorically incapable of making the distinction.

"I imagine someone is going to have to say at some point that the indoctrination in this case was so severe that it made Mr. Malvo unable to know right from wrong," she said. "I would be sorely disappointed if there is no such testimony."

Craig S. Cooley, a lawyer for Mr. Malvo, responded, "No more than I would be," and added that defense experts would testify that Mr. Malvo was indeed insane in that sense.

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(5) [A] clinical psychologist testified that Malvo was cheerful during a daylong neuropsychological evaluation in August, a mood he called ``really quite odd.''

``It was almost a goofy affect, if you will, which seemed quite out of step with the seriousness of the situation,'' said David Schretlen, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University. ``My conclusion is that Mr. Malvo produced an abnormal neuropsychological examination.''

Schretlen said on cross-examination that he found no evidence of psychosis.

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(6) When a social worker first interviewed sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo in jail, she was struck by the fact that the 18-year-old, who had spent almost all his life in Jamaica, acted like an oppressed American.

Carmeta Albarus, herself a Jamaican native, testified Thursday at Malvo's trial that she was taken aback that Malvo's Jamaican accent had totally disappeared. Malvo talked about racial injustice excessively, even though he attended one of the best high schools in Jamaica and lived in a nation where more than 90 percent of the country is black.

What's more, he insisted he be called John Lee Muhammad and was extremely defensive of the man he considered to be his father, John Allen Muhammad.

"Something was amiss in this Jamaican boy," she said.
. . .
Malvo also had complete confidence in Muhammad's plan to create a new, righteous society by taking 70 boys and 70 girls of all races to a compound in Canada who would then go out and change the world.

"I pointed out how ludicrous the thought was ... but he felt very confident this could be done because we have to start with the children," she said.

The $10 million demanded by the snipers in notes left at the crime scenes would have provided the funds to buy the land and establish the compound, Malvo told Albarus.

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(7) Albarus said about her first meeting with Malvo in March: "The thing that really jumped out at me was Lee spoke so much like an American. There was not even the trace of a Jamaican accent," which she thought remarkable because her own accent has not disappeared after 19 years in the United States.
. . .
Albarus also decided that "I would speak to him almost exclusively in Jamaican patois. I wanted to see . . . if his Jamaican identity was totally erased. He understood me, but he responded with his American accent."
. . .
Through trips to Jamaica and Antigua, Albarus said, she began separating Malvo from Muhammad's shadow. She said she interviewed Malvo's father, Leslie Malvo, and brought back an audiotape of his voice for Malvo in May.

"It was the first time Lee was hearing his father's voice in seven years," Albarus said. She said that Malvo reverted to his Jamaican accent and that when Leslie Malvo said, "That man [Muhammad] did this to my son," Lee Malvo had tears in his eyes.

(8) This article would seem to indicate that (with the press at least) Mr. Cooley is winning the battle for the hearts and minds over the prosecutor.