CrimLaw

Malvo:

The jury spent a day deliberating without any conclusion but it did have some requests:

The jurors asked several questions at the end of the day, including a request to again see the Chevrolet Caprice that Malvo and Muhammad allegedly used during last year's deadly shooting spree in the Washington, D.C., area. The car had a modified back seat that could lift up and allow access to the trunk.

Circuit Judge Jane Marum Roush denied the request, saying "we really don't want the jurors pawing through" the car.

The jury also asked for help with the definition of malice, a necessary element to a murder conviction. The definition provided in the jury instructions is "an intentional doing of a wrongful act ... at a time when the mind of the actor is under control of reason." The note said they have specific trouble with the phrase "under the control of reason."

Prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. said he is concerned that the jury is unnecessarily confusing the malice issue with the insanity issue and wanted to clarify that. But the defense lawyers argued that sanity is a legitimate issue when debating whether Malvo's actions amounted to malice.

"Malice is a state-of-mind issue and it's affected by sanity," Malvo lawyer Craig Cooley said.

Roush ruled that the jurors will have to use the common-sense definitions of "control of reason" and she can provide no further guidance.

Personally, reading about the case from afar, I think there is about a 70-80% probability of conviction. At the beginning of the trial the prosecution started out with a 99% chance of conviction but the Defense has chipped away. The Defense has offered better testimony and a sympathetic theory which sells much better than the prosecution theory that this was all part of a scheme - which Malvo was an equal partner in cooking up - to extort money from the government. I think that at the end of the trial the probability of conviction had sunk somewhere between 50-60%. However, the prosecution seems to have done a far better job in its closing argument than the Defense and I think that hurt the Defense badly.

Not that any of this matters all that much. If the kid isn't sentenced to death in this trial they can just que up one after another until one of them returns the desired verdict.