Steve Szkotak, San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2009
Attorneys for John Allen Muhammad released a May 2008 letter on Wednesday in which the mastermind of the deadly 2002 sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C., area proclaims his innocence.
The rambling, handwritten letter was made available because of requests for a statement from Muhammad, his attorneys wrote on the Web page of their law firm. The letter was filed in federal court in connection with Muhammad’s unsuccessful attempt to block his execution, the attorneys said.
Muhammad, 48, is scheduled to die by injection on Nov. 10 at a Virginia prison.
{snip}
The letter adds: “So all you police and prosecutors can stand-down-‘rushing’ to murder this innocent black man for something he nor his son (Lee) had nothing to do with. . . .”
Lee Boyd Malvo was Muhammad’s teenage accomplice, who is serving a life sentence. Muhammad fostered a father-son relationship with Malvo but the two were not related.
{snip}
The letter, written under the heading “Attorney Client Privilege,” was apparently filed during an attempt by lawyers to spare Muhammad from the death penalty.
{snip}
Muhammad was convicted of killing Dean Harold Meyers at a Manassas, Va., gas station during a three-week spree that killed 10 in October 2002. The killings happened in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.
{snip}
Muhammad’s lawyers also have asked Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for clemency, saying Muhammad is mentally ill and should not be executed.
[Editors Note: Muhammad’s letter can be downloaded as a PDF document read here. ]
Original article
(Posted on November 5, 2009)
Comments
While we’re on the subject, whatever happened to Dr. Moose?
As head of the Democratic Campaign Committee, which took such a drubbing this week, especially in Virginia, I don’t think that Governor Kaine’s checklist to broaden party appeal includes, “Pardon DC Sniper,” before he turns over the Mansion to Governor-Elect McDonald.
There was a reason that Muhammad was tried in Virginia instead of Maryland or DC, and that reason wasn’t clemency.
I remember this one very well. They had this guy twice but “profiler’s” said it was a white man. They let him go.
Once caught the authorities called him an idiot. The very next day he was a mastermind. Something about brilliant and black.
“While we’re on the subject, whatever happened to Dr. Moose?”
The last I heard, Chief Moose retired, and then came out of retirement to head a small police department in Hawaii. If you have the opportunity to double-dip, I can’t think of a better place to do it than Maui.
And the good citizens who called these two in are still waiting to collect the pro-offered reward(s).
The Feds offer rewards but never pay them.
And recall that Muhammad smuggled the mother and her 16-year-old son in from Jamacia, but she claimed they were stowaways on their own. She was the one who called police because Muhammad was having a homosexual affair with the teenager, which may explain why that kid did whatever the adult wanted. She has since been deported.
I’ll bet he thinks he should be freed from jail so he can help find the real snipers. Just like OJ.
Yet another innocent black man.
Just like OJ, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Hurricane Carter, H. Rap Brown, etc.
I’m not a supporter of the death penalty (it’s too barbaric, too prone to irreversible error and gives too much power to an already over-powerful state).
It’s fairly obvious to me that Muhammad is mentally ill, and should spend the rest of his life in a secure psychiatric unit. Studying his mental condition in such circumstances would almost certainly do far more to prevent similar crimes in future than executing him.
Look if the real truth were known and blacks were in charge they would have already commuted this murderer since the white system did it to him for killing a white and who knows if this dosent occur in the end anyway.
Johnny English,
I used to feel the same way that you did. Some crimes though are so heinous that anything less the death penalty feels like horrible miscarriage of justice. The murders in Knoxville are an excellent example.
“Look if the real truth were known and blacks were in charge they would have already commuted this murderer since the white system did it to him for killing a white and who knows if this dosent occur in the end anyway.”
Too bad for Muhammad that he tried to throw profilers off his trail by seeking out a Black school boy to show that he wasn’t just targetting White adults.
To the credit of Chief Moose and some high profile Blacks, they chimed in early on and Muhammad was never able to energize the ethnic crazies to induct him into the Black martyr hall of fame along with Tookie Williams, Rap Brown, OJ, and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
I think this is much like the scenario in the book,”Catch 22”.
If he didn’t care if he were executed he probably would be insane but they would execute him anyway. The very fact that he is worried about his own death proves that he is not insane so he should be executed.
Some catch that catch 22.
He killed ten random, innocent, everyday people from afar (were they all White folks?.)
He took away their lives, everything that they are and everything that will ever be.
Leaving families with unexplainable loss and grief.
Now he asks for clemency?
I wonder what makes him think that he deserves it?
Oh yeah that’s right,
he’s crazy.
“I remember this one very well. They had this guy twice but “profiler’s” said it was a white man. They let him go.”
On a tangential note: Isn’t it interesting that police departments will publicly insist that racial profiling is the worst thing ever, while hiring profilers? If it’s so wrong, then why are profilers so often correct? Granted, they were wrong in this particular case, and probably under political pressure to be wrong.
These black racists use the same tactics that the Nazis and other hate groups do. They paint themselves as victims and that they are justified in their evil doings in order to gain power and sympathy. History repeats itself because, as a professor of history told us, “History repeats itself because human emotions have always been the same.”
Daniel
The last time I checked, “Catch 22” was a popular work of fiction by the late Joseph Heller, not a textbook of psychiatry.
If I understand this goul’s latest demented ravings, the US government has nothing better whatsoever to do than spend huge sums of money it extorts from working taxpayers to provide show-trials that cover for the wrongful execution of innocent nonwhites. Surely, if the sinister forces running the racist US government had it in for blacks, they could come up with more economical methods of disposing of them, such as by filling their neighborhoods with free guns and drugs, poisoning the food at Church’s Chicken restaurants, injecting them with AIDS, etc.
As an aside, a additonal victim who is suspected of being murdered by the Muhammad/Malvo pair was Korean; all their other victims were white, though “hate crimes” enhancements were of course never added to the charges, the way they would have been if only the races of perpetrators and victims had been reversed.
As an aside, perhaps Muhammad should have tried to do a better job convincing the rest of us of his innocence, instead of simply wallowing in self-pity. After his conviction and sentencing, his conviction was upheld by the US Supreme Court, and apparently Governor Kaine has refused clememcy. It seems mathematically unlikely that all of the usual failsafes would get such a cut-and-dried case (in which the co-defendant, Malvo testified against him) wrong. Muhammad will receive a humane death - lethal injection consists of a large dose of barbituates that knocks the perp out and potassium, which stops the heart. To my mind, this is heaps better than a lot of the other ways people die, like cancer, diabetes, or bleeding to death on a filling station parking lot after being gunned down by a vicious stranger in an attack that seemed to have been provoked only by the victim’s being white and going about his own business.