USA Today: Death Penalty Distorts the Judicial System

In an edi­to­r­i­al pub­lished after a Virginia jury rec­om­mend­ed a death sen­tence for John Muhammad, USA Today not­ed that the case of Muhammad and his juve­nile co-defen­dant ​“under­mines pub­lic con­fi­dence that the law is applied objec­tive­ly.” The edi­to­r­i­al crit­i­cized the manip­u­la­tive place­ment of the case into Virginia courts and the stretch­ing of Virginia’s law to achieve the death penal­ty. Usually, Virginia has required that the defen­dant be the actu­al shoot­er to be eli­gi­ble for a death sen­tence. And Virginia’s new ter­ror­ism law may have been expand­ed con­sid­er­ably beyond its orig­i­nal intent for this case: 

In this instance, the bend­ing of the sys­tem began ear­ly. After the arrests of Muhammad and his teenage com­pan­ion, Lee Malvo, Attorney General John Ashcroft seized con­trol of the sus­pects. Though the pair had been caught in Maryland, where most of the killings occurred, fed­er­al author­i­ties hand­ed them over to Virginia for tri­al. One unvar­nished rea­son was that Malvo was a juve­nile. Maryland does not per­mit the exe­cu­tion of juve­nile offend­ers. Virginia does.
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Shopping for the most pro-death judi­cial venue and then cus­tom-fit­ting new and exist­ing laws to ensure what Ashcroft calls the ​“ulti­mate sanc­tion” make pros­e­cu­tors and law enforce­ment offi­cials look as if they were will­ing to go to great lengths — and even stretch the law — to achieve a death-penal­ty con­vic­tion.
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But twist­ing jus­tice was­n’t nec­es­sary to pro­tect the nation and pun­ish the crim­i­nal. Life with­out parole would have served equal­ly well.

The overzeal­ous appli­ca­tion of Virginia’s death penal­ty laws means that Muhammad’s case is like­ly to com­mand the nation’s atten­tion through years of appel­late maneu­ver­ing. Life with­out parole would have fore­stalled that tedious endgame with­out ever call­ing into ques­tion the integri­ty of the judicial establishment.