Washington sniper executed
A sniper who terrorised America during a three-week killing spree in 2002 was today executed by lethal injection.
John Allen Muhammad, 48, and his teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, were behind a series of attacks that left 10 people dead in and around the Washington DC area.
Muhammad was pronounced dead at 9.11pm local time (2.11am Wednesday, Irish time) at the Greenville Correctional Centre in Virginia. It followed the failure of an 11th-hour appeal by his lawyers to commute the sentence to life imprisonment on the ground that the convicted murderer was severely mentally ill.
It took five minutes for Muhammad to succumb to the drugs after being injected at 9.06pm.
The sniper was asked if he wished to give a final statement, but remained silent.
“He didn’t acknowledge us or look at us,” Larry Traylor, spokesman for Virginia Department of Corrections, said, adding: “He seemed quiet and relaxed, I never heard him utter a word or say anything in particular at all.”
The prison spokesman said Muhammad watched some of the procedure but remained unemotional.
Witnesses said he staggered into the execution room flanked by prison officers.
He twitched a minute into the procedure but was largely motionless, they added.
In a statement, Muhammad’s attorney Jonathan Sheldon, said that his client’s family deeply sympathise with the families and loved ones who had to relive the pain of the events of seven years ago.
He added: “Our sympathies also extend to the children of John Muhammad who with humility and self-consciousness today lost a father and a member of their family.”
Muhammad's reign of terror lasted from October 2 to October 24 in 2002.
During that time he and Malvo, then 17, taunted police as they shot people at random from their car.
In all some 16 people were hit by the snipers’ bullets across Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC. Ten people were killed as a result.
Within a 27-hour period at the beginning of the killing spree, six people were murdered by Muhammad and Malvo.
The pair are also suspected of being behind a series of fatal shootings in other states including Louisiana, Alabama and Arizona.
Malvo is serving a life sentence in prison for his part in the murders.
Muhammad and Malvo’s victims included a 13-year-old schoolboy who survived the attack and a 72-year-old who was gunned down while attempting to cross the road.
Muhammad, believed to be the mastermind behind the killings, was convicted in Virginia in 2003 of four counts including the murder of Dean Harold Meyers at a petrol station – the crime for which he was today executed. A jury recommended the death penalty with the sentenced confirmed in a Virginian court two years later
Further convictions over the snipers’ murders occurred in Maryland in 2005.
His execution came despite a last ditch appeal by his lawyers for clemency. A petition was put to Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine calling for Muhammad’s sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds that he was mentally ill. But no such reprieve was forthcoming.
Bob Meyers, whose brother Dean's murder led to today's execution, witnessed the moment the murderer died.
He told CNN’s 'Larry King Live': “It was surreal watching the life sapped out of someone intentionally.”
Mr Meyers said it represented “probably a point of closure,” adding: “But that was pretty much overcome just by the sadness that the whole situation generates in my heart. That he would get to the place where he did what he did and it had to come to this.”
Muhammad was executed for Meyers’ murder specifically because the trial occurred in Virginia, giving prosecutors a higher chance of obtaining the death penalty.
