Posted on 10/14/2003 11:27:57 AM PDT by kattracks
One of the two accused Washington snipers, John Allen Muhammad, pleaded not guilty at the start of his first trial over the 10 random killings last year that terrorised the US capital.Muhammad, 42, could face the death penalty if found guilty.
The trial has drawn enormous attention in the United States and some relatives of the victims of the shootings were in court.
Wearing a white shirt and black tie, Muhammad denied the four murder, terrorism and weapons charges against him and told Judge Leroy Millette he understood the accusations.
He watched silently as the start of the selection of 12 jurors, which could take several days, got under way.
The first trial concerns the killing of, Dean Myers, 53, who was shot in the head as he put petrol in his car in Manassas, Virginia on October 9 last year. Meyers was the seventh person killed in the series. The others included housewives and a bus driver.
Muhammad and his partner, John Lee Malvo, who is now 18, are accused of killing 10 people and wounding three others in the shooting spree between October 2 and October 22 last year. Victims were chosen at random, mainly in suburbs around Washington.
Muhammad and Malvo were detained two days after the last shooting as they slept in a car north of Washington. The two are also suspected of involvement in shootings in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona and Washington state.
They are to be tried separately with Malvo's trial -- for the killing of FBI analyst Linda Franklin -- to begin November 10 in Chesapeake, Virginia.
Virginia Beach is 320 kilometers (200 miles) from Washington. The hearings were moved from the federal capital because the judiciary feared it would be impossible to find jurors who not been affected by the huge publicity that surrounded the killings last year.
Malvo will also face the death penalty, even though he was a minor at the time of the killings.
Though Muhammad's defence lawyers have said they will plead that Muhammad did not pull the trigger of the rifle used to kill Meyers, prosecutors have said they plan to show that he had a controlling influence over the teenager.
A charge of terrorism, introduced after the September 11 attacks in 2001, has been used because prosecutors say the aim of the killings was to get the government to pay 10 million dollars to stop the shootings.
Muhammad, whose trial is expected to last up to six weeks, has refused to be examined by a pyschiatrist so the judge has ruled that he cannot use the defence of insanity.
Malvo's defence team also plans to plead insanity but this has been disputed by the prosecution. Malvo's lawyers say that the teenager, who had arrived from Jamaica before the shootings, had been brainwashed by Muhammad.
The mass trauma and draconian safety measures, including a ban on outdoor activities for children, and reward offers totalling 500,000 dollars, ended with the dawn arrest on October 24 of Malvo and Muhammad, found asleep in their car parked in a rest area.
Police discovered that the trunk of their car had concealed openings and the rear interior had been stripped out, allowing a sniper to lie prone with a hunting scope and fire a high powered rifle at random from a distance.
The instant the lethal shots were fired, the car would flee the area, long before police could react.
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