A Killing Tradition

When John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested in the Washington-area sniper case last year, Attorney General John Ashcroft began to push immediately for a trial in Virginia rather than Maryland. Besides his obvious partiality for a jurisdiction that executes prisoners in great numbers, Ashcroft may have known something about American legal history--namely, that Virginia has a historic tradition of executing minors, a tradition that began in the eighteenth century.

Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the murders of which he and Muhammad are accused, is scheduled to go to trial on November 10. Muhammad's trial began in mid-October.

According to Victor Streib, a professor at Ohio Northern University Law School and author of Death Penalty for Juveniles, there have been thirty-four people executed for crimes committed as minors in Virginia from the colonial period to the present, nearly all of them African-American boys whose victims were white females. Streib's grim inventory of cases is based on groundbreaking research originally compiled by M. Watt Espy, a self-educated historian from Headland, Alabama, and derived from state Department of Corrections records, newspapers, county histories, proceedings of state and local courts, holdings of historical societies and other listings of executions.

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