John Allen Muhammad

File:08-muhammad-court-inside.jpg

John Allen Muhammad in court

John Allen Muhammad (born John Allen Williams on December 31, 1960) carried out the Beltway sniper attacks in an apparent attempt to extort $10 million dollars during his shooting spree. He and his younger partner Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested in connection with the attacks on October 24, 2002, following tips from alert citizens.

His trial for one of the murders (in Prince William County, Virginia) began in October 2003, and the following month, he was found guilty of capital murder. Four months later he was sentenced to death. He has not been tried on additional charges in other Virginia jurisdictions, as well as least four other states and the District of Columbia involving 12 other deaths and three serious woundings. While awaiting execution in Virginia, in August 2005, he was extradited to Maryland to face some of the charges there.

Background

Muhammad is a U.S. Army veteran of the Gulf War. In the Army, Muhammad was trained as a mechanic, truck driver and specialist metalworker. He qualified as an "expert" with the M16, the Army's standard infantry rifle. This rating is the Army's highest of three levels of marksmanship for a typical soldier. To receive an expert badge for the M16, Muhammad would have had to hit 36 out of 40 targets, ranging from 50 to 300 meters during his yearly qualification on the M16. However, award of the "expert" badge is not uncommon, and in no way qualifies a soldier as a military sniper. Typically, many units will send soldiers back to the firing line until they qualify as "expert" if extra ammunition is available. The Bushmaster rifle believed to have been used to commit the shootings is a civilian version of the M16. Each of the victims—10 dead, three wounded—were hit by single .223-caliber shots.

Born John Allen Williams, he changed his name to Muhammad in October 2001. He was a member of the religious black separatist group Nation of Islam. Friends say Muhammad helped provide security for Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March" in 1995, but Farrakhan has publicly distanced himself and his organization from Muhammad's actions. It was theorized that Muhammad left the Nation of Islam around 1999 and then joined Jamaat al-Fuqra, which is a militant Islamic group composed mostly of African-Americans. [1] However, later investigations indicated that he moved out of the country and spent time in Antigua during this period, apparently engaging in credit card and immigration document fraud activities.

After his arrest, authorities also learned that Muhammad admired and modeled himself after Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and approved of the September 11, 2001 attacks. One of Malvo's psychiatric witnesses testified in his trial that Muhammad had indoctrinated him into believing that the proceeds of the extortion attempt would be used to begin a new nation of only pure black young persons somewhere in Canada. Muhammad is also alleged to have been an extreme anti-Semite and referred to Jews as "dirty people" and is said to have praised both Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. [2]

Muhammad is twice divorced; former wife Mildred Muhammad sought and was granted a restraining order. Muhammad was arrested on federal charges of violating the restraining order against him, by possessing a weapon.

See also main article Beltway Sniper Attacks

Muhammad was caught after police followed a lead in which an anonymous caller (presumably Muhammad) told a priest to tell the police to check out a killing in Montgomery, Alabama. Federal officials were able to connect such a killing to Jamaican immigrant, Lee Boyd Malvo, whose fingerprints were on file with the INS. Malvo was known to associate with Muhammad. They had lived together in Bellingham, Washington, where Malvo used the alias John Lee Malvo.

Prosecution, convictions, death sentence, pending charges

In October 2003, Muhammad went on trial for the murder of Dean Meyers at a Manassas, Virginia service station. The trial had been moved from Prince William County, where Meyers was killed, to Virginia Beach, approximately 200 miles away. Muhammad was granted the right to represent himself in his defense, and dismissed his legal counsel, though he immediately switched back to having legal representation after his opening argument. Muhammad was charged with murder, terrorism, conspiracy and the illegal use of a firearm, and faced a possible death sentence. Prosecutors said the shootings were part of a plot to extort $10 million from local and state governments. The prosecution said that they would make the case for 16 shootings allegedly involving Muhammad. The terrorism charge against Muhammad required prosecutors to prove he committed at least two shootings in a three-year period.

The prosecution called more than 130 witnesses and introduced more than 400 pieces of evidence intended to prove that Muhammad had undertaken the shooting spree and ordered Malvo to help carry it out. However, the prosecution never introduced direct evidence that Muhammad had killed anyone. Instead, it methodically assembled bits of evidence intended to leave the inescapable impression that he had been at the center of the killings.

That evidence included a rifle, found in Muhammad's car, that has been linked by ballistics tests not only to 8 of the 10 killings in the Washington area but also to 2 others, in Louisiana and Alabama; the car itself, which was modified, prosecutors say, so that a sniper could shoot from inside the trunk; and a laptop computer, also found in the car, that contained maps with icons pinpointing shooting scenes.

There were also witness accounts that put Muhammad across the street from one shooting and his car near the scene of several others. And there was a recorded phone call to a police hotline in which a man, his voice identified by a detective as Muhammad's, demanded money in exchange for stopping the shootings.

"Certainly this is a circumstantial case," said Paul B. Ebert, the prosecutor. "But I would submit to the court that it would be hard to imagine any more circumstances possible that demonstrate he was guilty of being the actual perpetrator of the killing of Dean Meyers" (a victim).

Muhammad's defense asked the court to drop the capital murder charges due to the fact that there was no direct evidence. Malvo's fingerprints were on the Bushmaster rifle found in Muhammad's car, and genetic material from Muhammad himself was also discovered on the rifle. But the defense contended that Muhammad could not be put to death under Virginia's so-called trigger-man law unless he actually pulled the trigger to kill Meyers, and no one testified that they saw him do so.

On November 17, 2003, by unanimous verdict of his jury, Muhammad was convicted in Virginia of all four counts in the indictment against him: capital murder for the shooting of Dean H. Meyers; a second charge of capital murder under Virginia's antiterrorism statute, for homicide committed with an intent to terrorize the government or the public at large; conspiracy to commit murder; and the illegal use of a firearm.

In the penalty phase of the trial, the jury after five hours of deliberation over two days unanimously recommended that Muhammad be sentenced to death. On March 9, 2004, a Virginia judge agreed with the jury's recommendation and sentenced John Allen Muhammad to death.

On April 22, 2005, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed his death penalty, stating that Muhammad could be sentenced to death because the murder was part of an act of terrorism. The court also rejected an argument by defense lawyers that he could not be sentenced to death because he was not the triggerman in the killings done by Muhammad and his young accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo.

"With calculation, extensive planning, premeditation and ruthless disregard for life, Muhammad carried out his cruel scheme of terror." Virginia Supreme Court Justice Donald Lemons

It is not clear how many any other jurisdictions will be allowed to try him on the capital charges they have pending before he is executed in Virginia. In May 2005, Maryland and Virginia reached an agreement to allow his extradition to face Maryland charges, but Muhammad was fighting the action legally. He was held at the maximum security Sussex I State Prison near Waverly in Sussex County, Virginia, which houses Virginia's death row inmates. While awaiting execution in Virginia, in August 2005, he was extradited to Maryland to face some of the charges there.

Civil lawsuit

In 2003, Malvo and Muhammad were named in a major civil lawsuit by the Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence on behalf of some two of their victims who were seriously wounded and the families of some of those murdered. Although Malvo and Muhammad were each believed to be indigent, codefendants Bull's Eye Shooter Supply and Bushmaster Firearms, Inc. contributed to a landmark $2.5 million out-of-court settlement in late 2004.

See also

• Beltway Sniper Attacks
• Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
• Serial killer

External links

• An Angry Telephone Call Provided One Crucial Clue, The New York Times, October 25, 2002 - explains tracking and arrest of Muhammad (paid article)
• CNN Special Report: Sniper Attacks, the legal case
• Indictment Virginia. v. Muhammad
• Order changing venue: Virginia v. Muhammad
• NY Times-Prosecution closes case