Death Penalty News

Maryland’s highest court ruled that Washington, D.C.-area sniper Lee Boyd Malvo has to be resentenced due to U.S. Supreme Court decisions on constitutional protections for juveniles made after his sentencing. Malvo had been sentenced to six life sentences without the possibility of parole. He was 17 at the time of the murders.  The Maryland Court of Appeals said it is unlikely that Malvo would ever be released because he is also serving separate life sentences for murders in Virginia. “As a practical matter, this may be an academic question in Mr. Malvo’s case, as he would first have to be granted parole in Virginia before his consecutive life sentences in Maryland even begin,” Judge Robert McDonald wrote in the majority opinion released Friday. Maryland’s highest court ruled that Washington, D.C.-area sniper Lee Boyd Malvo has to be resentenced due to U.S. Supreme Court decisions on constitutional protections for juveniles made after his sentencing. But it is not up to the Court o...

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Judy Clarke Judy Clarke excelled at saving the lives of notorious killers. Then she took the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Clarke may be the best death-penalty lawyer in America. Her efforts helped spare the lives of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called “twentieth hijacker” in the 9/11 plot), and Jared Loughner (who killed six people and wounded thirteen others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, at a Tucson mall). “Every time Judy takes a new case, it’s a soul-searching process for her,” Clarke’s old friend Elisabeth Semel told me. “Because it’s an enormous responsibility.” On rare occasions when Clarke withdrew or was removed from a defense team, a defendant received the death penalty. But in cases that she tried through the sentencing phase, she had never lost a client to death row. The administration of capital punishment is notoriously prone to error. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a hundred ...