Guilty as charged

Washington Post: John Allen Muhammad's conviction Monday in the sniper killings was hardly a surprise. The evidence that he and Lee Boyd Malvo carried out the attacks was overwhelming. His chief defense was not credible: to shift blame to then-17-year-old Mr. Malvo, whom common sense and the evidence alike make out as the subordinate alleged partner in the killing spree.
Somewhat less overwhelming is the evidence that Mr. Muhammad was guilty of the specific capital crimes with which he was charged -- that is, terrorism within the meaning of Virginia's post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism statute and acting as the immediate perpetrator of at least two killings in three years. The Virginia Beach jury answered yes on both counts. These questions, not whether the defendant was an innocent man wrongly accused, were the hard ones in the case, and they will likely dominate Mr. Muhammad's appeal as well. For Mr. Muhammad was apparently not the triggerman in the killings, the normal standard for what's called a "principal in the first degree." And the sniper killings, while they seem to satisfy the strict language of the commonwealth's anti-terrorism law, were not what most Americans think of when they hear the word "terrorism."
Working together
Yet the jury's determination seems defensible. It is possible, after all, for two people working as a team to carry out the same murder, and the prosecution presented a great deal of evidence that Mr. Muhammad was working in a partnership over a considerable period of time toward a common objective: the deaths of innocent people. Moreover, he attempted to extort $10 million from the government, caused enormous public intimidation and fear, and altered public behavior around the region, thus meeting the definition of terrorism in the Virginia law. We oppose the death penalty and would prefer to see a sentence of life in prison with no parole; his fate will be decided in a penalty phase proceeding that began after the verdict. But considering the evidence, the jury's judgment that the prosecution proved its case was a reasonable one.