Convicted (in Virginia) sniper, John Allen Muhammad, is serving as his own legal counsel in a trial about several murders in Maryland. Various lawyers have described Muhammad's legal ability as "above average for a layperson," as "look[ing] like a regular lawyer," "prepared," and "black."
Muhammad has shown wit in court, including when his public defenders argued that he had a "brain dysfunction" and was incompetent to act as his own attorney.
Muhammad yelled out, "Your honor, can I sit over there with them?" looking at the prosecution table.
Muhammad was cross-examining a D.C. police officer, Henry Gallagher, who described one of the numerous encounters in which Muhammad is alleged to have barely eluded capture. Gallagher pulled over Muhammad near one of the murder scenes, issuing him only a verbal warning for speeding and going through two stop signs.
"Sir, let me ask you something," Muhammad said. "What does it take to get a traffic citation in the nation's capital?"
The prosecution's new strategy is to claim that Muhammad is such an effective lawyer, that he's clearly smart enough to have killed those people. They'll win too, just as sure as Zacharias Moussaoui is back-shit crazy.
Portions of this post were taken from the Washington Post article "Man accused in sniper rampage seems remade" by Eric Rich
1 comment:
wow, I all but forgot about him. Thanks for reminding me.
I remember something about one of the victims of that shooting spree being an FBI agent in charge of a pretty damaging espionage investigation.
It will be interesting to see how this whole thing pans out.
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