(1) The prosecutor made valiant efforts in the attempt to shake the Defense's expert psychologist:
During cross-examination today, prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. said Malvo committed his first killing at Muhammad's bidding just 10 weeks after he ran away from his mother. Malvo confessed to the Feb. 16, 2002, slaying of Keenya Cook in Tacoma, saying he walked up to her house and shot her in the face at point-blank range.- - -
"By February 16 he goes out and shoots a woman he doesn't even know in the face and kills her," Horan said in questioning the defense psychologist. "And it is your testimony he did this because he was indoctrinated by Muhammad?"
Psychologist Dewey Cornell said Malvo wanted to please Muhammad and that Cook's killing served as Malvo's first test that he would do Muhammad's bidding.
Horan suggested Tuesday that Cornell sought to change Malvo's attitudes and played chess with him in order to do so.- - -
Cornell, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Virginia, said he played chess with Malvo "to improve our relationship ... so that he would be more likely to tell me the truth."
Horan queried later, "You were getting paid by the taxpayers, weren't you?"
"Not for the chess time," Cornell responded.
[June 1] was the first time, Cornell said, that Malvo acknowledged that he had been manipulated by Muhammad and began to tell a different version of events. Malvo began to say that he been only the spotter -- not the shooter [em dash] in all but the final sniper shooting.
That, Cornell said, is the real Lee Malvo.
Prosecutors don't buy it. In crossexamining Cornell Tuesday, lead prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. made a mockery of Malvo's conversion, repeatedly referring to the "old Malvo" and the "new Malvo" as if they were two different people. Horan asked which Malvo had committed various crimes, and which Malvo that Cornell had evaluated.
But Cornell wouldn't play along. "You want to call it the old Malvo and the new Malvo, but I wouldn't say there's one day in which there's a new Malvo," said Cornell, a University of Virginia psychologist who spent 54 hours with Malvo this year. "I'd say there is a process he went through and is continuing to go through."
(2) The Defenses next witness is "an international authority in the field of child soldiering":
"The purpose is to get children to do what they've been told without emotions getting in the way," Neil Boothby, an international authority in the field of child soldiering, told jurors as Malvo's capital murder trial continued in Chesapeake.
Boothby, who has observed child soldiers in war-torn countries such as Rwanda and Bosnia, testified that guerilla or state-sponsored leaders indoctrinate children to kill for a variety of supposedly just causes: religious, political, ethnic or racial reasons.
Boothby described an "emotional numbing" process that can render child soldiers so completely brainwashed that the youths can operate free of direct adult supervision and will not turn on their leaders if captured.
If a leader learns a child soldier has doubts about killing, Boothby said, the leader often will portray those moments as a sign of weakness.
. . .
Chief prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. vehemently objected to Boothby's testimony, saying it was irrelevant to the string of sniper attacks that left 10 people dead and three more wounded from the Washington suburbs to the Richmond area in October 2002.
"I'm not aware of any war fought by children in the United States," Horan argued. Malvo "wasn't prepared for war, he was prepared for assasination."
My comment: I really wish I could be in the courtroom watching the jurors' reactions. I know how all this reads in the papers - an overbearing prosecutor, trying too hard, is overmatched by Mr. Cooley and company. However, without watching the trial in progress I know better than to assume that is how it is actually playing out. It could be that the prosecution is in tune with the jury and Mr. Cooley & Co. look like they are scrambling around desperately for something, anything which might save their client (not that anybody I know has ever seen Mr. Cooley scramble in a courtroom). Still, I think that at the end of the day the case is just so overwhelming that the prosecution will win the innocence / guilt phase. The real fight remains the battle over whether the kid will be killed or not.
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