Posted on 12/04/2003 11:04:43 AM PST by marshmallow
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:03:32 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
CHESAPEAKE, Virginia (CNN) -- Several dozen jailhouse sketches by accused sniper Lee Boyd Malvo -- some depicting police in rifle crosshairs and others containing references to a holy war -- have been entered as evidence by defense attorneys, who say they are evidence of his indoctrination by an accomplice.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Alright, class, whatever vehicle you use as your hide, Moose will call it a "white van"--so, we suggest a blue sedan. Questions?
The defense claim is that Malvo was insane because he was unduly influenced by Mohammed. If Malvo was insane, then so were all the Nazis we executed after World War Two. After all, they had been subject to influence.
Defense submits images of hate and terror, hoping to show a disturbed mind
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By Andrea F. Siegel
Sun Staff
Originally published December 4, 2003
CHESAPEAKE, Va. - Hoping to shed light on what they believe was an insane mind, defense attorneys for sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo presented a judge yesterday with dozens of sketches that the teen-ager scribbled in his jail cell while awaiting trial for last fall's sniper attacks - crimes that Malvo depicted in his art as "jihad" in America.
Filled with rambling anti-American messages and hand-drawn images of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and a mix of characters from The Matrix movie, the drawings offer an eerie glimpse of Malvo and the possible motivation behind the sniper siege that spread terror around the nation's capital.
"I would take you out at your dinner table. ... You will not escape, America. Not now, not ever," Malvo wrote on one sketch, which shows the cross hairs of a rifle superimposed over a police officer. Another sketch shows cross hairs aiming at the White House.
Malvo's defense lawyers entered a binder of more than 100 pages containing not only the disturbing sketches, but also letters and jail reports, as court evidence yesterday. All were drawn or written last spring, while Malvo, 18, was jailed in Virginia. Collectively, they depict a teen-ager bursting with rage.
One reads: "If you are the black man in skin and white in mind then you are 'white,' you are my enemy and I will destroy you. I don't want and will not kill you, I will destroy you utterly!"
On another are the words, "We[sic] marching for no civil rights nonsense, we will not beg, we will earn it like men, with our blood, so my children may live in a world without you plaguerizing[sic], deceiving and controling[sic] their lives."
When the nine-woman, seven-man jury will be handed the binder is unclear. It was presented yesterday to Fairfax County Circuit Judge Jane Marum Roush, who is presiding over the case. Although the documents are now formally entered into the trial as evidence, the jury has yet to view them.
In all, 134 documents were catalogued into evidence yesterday - the largest single submission of evidence during the trial.
Malvo appears to have spent many hours in his cell spreading his mind out on paper. The blue-lined paper pages were sometimes surreptitiously plucked out of his cell by jail officers during contraband inspections, and at other times Malvo crumbled them into balls and flung them through his jail bars.
While the letters and drawings express a wide range of militant sentiments, the most recurring theme is that of jihad - or holy war - against America.
"We did not start this flame, we merely picked up the torch," he wrote on the drawing showing bin Laden near a police officer in a rifle's sights. "Ye shall all die! Every last one."
Other drawings show rifles and semiautomatic weapons drawn in meticulous detail next to the words "Expend all energy on target," and also a fixation on the enormously popular Matrix movie. In them, Malvo wrote of the need to "Free the Mind."
"Talking is over," Malvo wrote in another about oppression of blacks. Elsewhere on it, he scrawled, "I failed so I die, that is a simple fact of nature, of evolution. If I were you, I would kill me too."
And another: "I have been accused on my mission. Allah knows I'm gonna suffer now." In the past, Malvo's defense team has said the jailhouse musings show just how brainwashed Malvo was by his accomplice, John Allen Muhammad.
Experts said the documents are likely to play an important role in the jury's decision on Malvo's sanity at the time of the crimes.
"If they get the right expert to connect to the jury who says this is the destruction of his mind, they may get somewhere," said Jose F. Anderson, a University of Baltimore law professor who has supervised death penalty appeals in Maryland.
However, lawyers for Malvo failed yesterday to place before the jury an alarming letter the teen-age sniper suspect wrote two months before last fall's Washington-area sniper siege, in which the youth expressed fear that Muhammad would kill him, called himself a time bomb close to exploding and wrote about despair in his life.
"I have a father who I know is going to have to kill me for a righteous society to prevail," the letter says, according to defense lawyer Craig S. Cooley.
The letter is valuable to the defense, which hopes to prove that Malvo was insane during last year's sniper shootings and participated in them only because he was so brainwashed by Muhammad that he could no longer discern right from wrong.
Defense lawyer Michael S. Arif argued that the letter, which has not been made public, depicts Malvo's state of mind around the end of July last year, just two months before 10 people were shot dead in the Washington area by a sniper's bullet. It includes him writing that "he was going to explode," Arif said.
But Roush agreed with Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr.'s contention that the letter was "pure, unadulterated hearsay" - unsubstantiated remarks from someone who cannot be questioned about them.
Defense lawyers said they have not given up trying to get the letter before the jury.
Malvo wrote it to Muhammad's 17-year-old niece, LaToria Williams, while the two men visited Muhammad's family in summer of last year in Baton Rouge, La.
Roush refused to allow testimony about the letter's contents, including Williams' thoughts about the letter. With jurors out of the room, Williams testified that the words scared her, so she gave the letter to her mother.
Steven D. Benjamin of Richmond, president-elect of the Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the defense may not need that letter in evidence, and that its introduction could backfire on them because it suggests that Malvo was not fully indoctrinated, knew what was going on and understood the danger.
Last week, a Virginia Beach jury sentenced Muhammad to die for last year's Oct. 9 fatal shooting of Dean Harold Meyers, who was gunned down at a Manassas gas station.
Malvo is charged with two counts of capital murder in the fatal shooting of FBI analyst Linda Franklin on Oct. 14 of last year. Franklin was gunned down in the parking lot of a Home Depot in the Seven Corners section of Fairfax County as she stood a few feet from her husband. One count alleges that Malvo committed multiple murders within three years; the other is under Virginia's untested anti-terrorism law, accusing him of scheming to extort $10 million from the government in exchange for ending the shooting spree.
Also yesterday, Earl Dancy Jr., a friend of Muhammad's in Tacoma, Wash., testified that Muhammad took Malvo to a firing range to teach him to shoot and trained him on sniper-like video games. He said he illegally bought a gun for Muhammad and that he helped him try to make fake identifications.
Also, Glen Chapman, a Ferndale, Wash., gunsmith, testified that Muhammad came to ask him in November 2001 if he could cut a gun barrel into sections for his son, so that it could be transported in a small case and then screwed together for reassembly.
"It only works in the movies," Chapman said, explaining that the force of a bullet firing through the weak point in the barrel probably would blow the barrel off.
Inadmissible Letter Is Called Plea for Help
By Serge F. Kovaleski
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 4, 2003; Page B01
CHESAPEAKE, Va., Dec. 3 -- It was scrawled in the darkness, late at night, with the covers pulled over his head to avoid any detection that the letter was being written at all.
The four small pieces of paper reveal the scattered thoughts of a 17-year-old expressing self-loathing, fear and despair to a girl he had a crush on.
They are the words of Lee Boyd Malvo in the midst of his cross-country odyssey with John Allen Muhammad.
"Why am I here, there seems for me no purpose," he wrote. "Everyone who has met me hates my gutsy rambling and consider my jibberish fake," Malvo wrote to one of Muhammad's nieces in Baton Rouge, La., in the summer of 2002.
"My patience is thinning, my conflict unresolved, my psyche and fear strewn," he wrote. "I should have been banished and killed . . . for I'm perceived as a walking time bomb waiting to explode . . . All I asked is to be loved."
Attorneys representing Malvo at his capital murder trial here have described the letter as a plea for help by a vulnerable youth who they claim was manipulated by Muhammad into participating in last fall's sniper shootings. They tried to enter it into evidence Wednesday so the jury could see it, but a Fairfax County judge ruled it hearsay.
The missive was written at the Baton Rouge home of one of Muhammad's relatives after the pair had spent a week in the city. They were staying in separate bedrooms, and Malvo's handwriting was not as neat as it has appeared elsewhere, perhaps because of the darkness.
Did you check out the links to Malvo's Islamic and Allah Akbar drawings and writings on this thread.
If I were FBI/CIA, I'd check out the other folks and computers at the Mosque. It certainly gives a means of communication with other (Nasty) mosque folks.
Thanks for the ping. This is the first real evidence there was an Islam influence in the undercurrents (no surprise). Ole rascist Moose in the white guy van theory was able to stave off a lot of speculation in that area.
Did you catch Chris Core's show tonight on WMAL? He read a letter Malvo wrote and then spent the time lamenting how the poor thing had such hard life. IMHO, most people who have a crappy life don't take up the sport of human hunting.
Dang. Wish I read this earlier today. Would have like to ask Chris how hard we should lament for terrorists.
MEG33 I believe that the government is fully aware of M&M's connections to the terrorist, but isn't this a better way to put them out of their misery. Unlike the Mousauii(sp?) and Padella mess. Oh and less not forget John Walker Lindh (20 years), he should be on death row also.
Amen. Too many kids get the short stick cuz of their parent's indulgences but few feel their due is taking human life. This kid decided human life was his to control, his to end.
I don't believe once a person has entered this sick frame he no longer can fit in society. It's sad this kid is a mass murder, but it is still a fact and society needs to be protected from such, at all cost.
This is a case where we have to say that malvo really way over stepped the bonds of civilized society. He need to be dismissed, one-way or another.
I would think that a Farrakhan-connected Black Muslim killing one of Farrakhan's business associates would be interesting to the FBI.
Then again, it would be a sufficiently hot potato, politically, that perhaps some senior FBI people don't want to touch it. Remember Chief Moose and the "white guys in the white van" theory that was so tenaciously held? (at least until an FBI employee was hit, at which point they got serious and closed in on Mohammad right quickly)
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