DC Sniper Execution Date Is Set For November 10th 2009

According to his lawyers, John Allen Muhammad has been told that he will be executed by lethal injection on November the 10th 2009. The decision was taken by a Northern Virginian judge who has decided that it is now time for the D.C. Sniper to meet his maker. Muhammad was convicted for a series of shootings in Washington during 2002, which lead to the death of 11 out of the 16 victims. His accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, a minor, is serving a life sentence for his part in that deadly partnership, but Muhammad was considered to be the instigator and was therefore treated to a more severe punishment, but only a decade ago he would have been considered an 'all-American hero'. When he was 18 he joined the Louisiana National Guard, and seven years later he moved onto the US Army. He then served in the first Gulf War, and was a trained expert with a rifle, talents he then put to fatal use during his subsequent killing spree in the Washington area. Now that circle of violence will be complete when his life is ended by a succession of three different injections, which will kill him in just a few minutes.

September.17.2009 - George Valentine Corr, Blatant News Editor
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THE CRIMES OF THE DC SNIPER
For three frightening weeks in October 2002, Maryland, D.C. and Virginia were in a state of fear after a series of apparently random shootings in the greater metropolitan area of Washington, and along Interstate 95 in Virginia. By the end of the killing spree, ten people had been shot dead and another three were left injured, and it further transpired that one other killing and two other injuries, from September shootings, were also carried out by the same people. The police eventually got their men, having believed at first that it was a single man in a white van, it actually turned out to be a deadly pairing - John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo - who were driving around in a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan. They shot randomly at normal folk who were just going about their daily business, including mowing their grass, pushing shopping trolleys and filling their cars with petrol. Another startling revelation was the race of the perpetrators. It was highly unlikely for African-Americans to be caught for mindless serial killing crimes, and their crime spree unleashed a massive public outcry which lead to quite a speedy trial, conviction, and now execution too.

THE TRIALS OF THE DC SNIPER
At first Mohammad and Malvo were convicted of murder and weapons-related charges which were linked to two of the killings. The jury’s and judges at those two trials, both held in Virginia, all agreed that Mohammad would receive the death penalty, and that Malvo would instead get life imprisonment, due to him being a minor. Malvo had tried to make out that he was the main man, to save Mohammad from the death penalty, as Mohammad had told him that if he took the lead charges, they would not put a minor to death. When these tactics failed to stop the death penalty being awarded, Malvo eventually came clean and explained that Mohammad was the mastermind afterall. In April of 2005 the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty could be carried out on Mohammad because his crimes were "acts of terrorism". Then in May 2006, Maryland convicted the two men of six more murders and both were given six consecutive life sentences, but Mohammad will not get the chance to serve any of that jail time, as he will be put to death in the next few months, unless the Virginia Governor - Timothy Kaine - grants clemency, or the US Supreme Court allows a final appeal. Those are his only two legal options left.

THE VIOLENT PAST
At the tender age of 18, in 1978 John Allen Williams (his birth name) joined the Louisiana National Guard, and then enlisted into the US Army in 1985. He converted to Islam in 1987, and in 1991 he served in the Gulf War as a sergeant, but his main talents along the way seemed to be his sharpshooting skills, for which he received the highest level of training from the Army. He was basically trained as a sharpshooting killer by them, for their own purposes, but after the Gulf War was over he was discharged by the military, and his skills didn't really cut it in the real world. For a while he spent time in the US and Antigua doing some credit card fraud to get by, and in 2001 - just 1 month after the September the 11th massacres - he changed his surname to Mohammad. It seems at this point that he was a troubled individual. His part in the Gulf war was troubling him to some degree, his life was going nowhere and he had basically been dropped into the real world by the Army with no real skills or sense of place. I believe that his subsequent killings were brought about by this inner battle. People can say that he wanted to be a martyr of some sort, but from that storyline, and where he ended up, its possible that he would have carried out the very same senseless crimes in the name of another cause, if he connected more with that. This is certainly not a case of Muslim extremism, it is a case of not being looked after correctly in a violent society.

ONE IN A MILLION
It seems to me that this man, and many like him, are time bombs waiting to blow. It may be simplistic to look at things like this, but coming from a land where guns are illegal for most people to hold - Ireland - and where you generally never actually see them, it seems obvious that if a man spends his entire time with a gun in his hand, and with an army uniform on, in training and on the battlefield, then he is bound to blow at some point. Especially if he also feels like life has not treated him very fairly, and if he may be suffering from post traumatic stress due to being in a warzone. And anyone who goes to war suffers trauma to some extent, there can be no argument against that. A lot of American’s are passionate in protecting their right to bear arms, but maybe if their government, secret services and military were not so powerful and controlling, then maybe, just maybe, they would not feel the need to protect themselves in their own land. Again, this is easy for me to say coming from a small country, with a government which is much easier to get to, but it seems that some of the potentially best anti-gun voices in the US are probably currently pro-gun for reasons of self preservation, and that is the real shame. I am against the death penalty, but I also believe that you must create the correct type of society where the death penalty is not actually needed. Mohammad is a product of the system, therefore the system should also pay for those crimes, through some serious reform.

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