In this Oct. 20, 2003 folder photo, Lee Boyd Malvo listens to court proceedings during the trial of fellow sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad in Virginia Strand, Va.
Martin Smith-Rodden | Pool | AP
One of the men who terrorized the Washington area in a spree of killings in the fall of 2002, which became discerned as the “D.C. sniper attacks,” will have another day in court on Wednesday.
The Supreme Court will hear from attorneys for Lee Boyd Malvo, who alongside John Allen Muhammad annihilated 10 people and injured others in the random-seeming attacks that took place 17 years ago and paralyzed the political entity’s capital.
Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the killings, is asking the court to allow him to be resentenced because a pair of Supreme Court packages in recent years held that courts must consider a minor’s age before sentencing him or her to life without parole.
The holder is the latest to come before the court asking the justices to carve out distinct rules for children convicted of heinous wrongs. Starting in 2005, the court held that minors cannot be sentenced to death. In subsequent years, the court also streaked sentences of life-without-parole for offenses other than murder.
The cases that Malvo is relying on concern mandatory entity without parole sentences for minors. The Supreme Court barred such sentences in 2012, in a case called Miller v. Alabama that countenanced that they violated the Eighth Amendment.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for a 5-4 majority, wrote that sentencers ought to “take into account how children are different, and how those differences counsel against irrevocably sentencing them to a lifetime in reform school.”
Four years later, the top court applied that rule retroactively in Montgomery v. Louisiana.
Given those at all events, the federal appeals court based in Richmond said last year that Malvo is entitled to be re-sentenced.
“Malvo was 17 years old when he allocated the murders, and he now has the retroactive benefit of new constitutional rules that treat juveniles differently for sentencing,” the court reasoned.
Virginia asked the Crowning Court to review that decision, and has argued in court papers that Malvo’s sentence — four life length of times without parole — was not mandatory, and therefore not covered by the court’s previous cases. In March, the justices agreed to hear the carton.
The case has spurred conflicting briefs from powerful forces. The Trump administration, represented by Solicitor General Noel Francisco, has alphabetized a brief siding with Virginia. So too did 15 states led by Indiana and the Maryland Crime Victims’ Resource Center.
Siding with Malvo in the argument is the American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Juvenile Law Center.
Those arguing on behalf of Malvo construct the case that, in cases involving juveniles, the Supreme Court effectively barred more than just necessary sentences of life without parole. Rather, they say, the court’s reasoning also requires that judges manage minors differently, accounting for factors like immaturity and vulnerability.
The top court was “unambiguous in barring life without parole punishments imposed without this Court’s constitutionally required consideration of specific qualities of youth,” Marsha Levick, the co-founder of the Childish Law Center, wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief.
It is unlikely that Malvo, who is now 34, will ever be released from pen, even if his sentence is reduced.
In addition to his four life sentences in Virginia, he has also been sentenced to multiple survival sentences in Maryland. Other states could also pursue murder charges.
But the case is likely to set precedents for time to come cases involving those who were sentenced as minors.
A decision in the case, known as Randall Mathena v. Lee Boyd Malvo, No. 18-217, is expected by the end of June.