Strong medicine for D.C. sniper

Not to over-dramatize, but it's a strange feeling to pump gas wondering if the next moment you might be shot.

That's what many folks in the environs of Washington experienced in that macabre fall of 2002, when a mysterious and ruthless sniper was pointing the fatal finger of fate at people who happened to show up at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

A family member of mine was ill in Northern Virginia during those weeks, and I was often on the road in that area. A gas stop involved keeping a lookout for the white van that supposedly had been linked to the shootings, then sort of hunching down as if bucking a strong wind, trying to be inconspicuous.

No dilly-dallying. After all, the sniper had gotten Dean Meyers, a 53-year-old civil engineer and Purple Heart veteran of Vietnam, and all Meyers was trying to do was to fill his tank one evening at a station in Manassas.

Now, Virginia has gotten the sniper, or one of them. John Allen Muhammad on Wednesday evening paid with his life for the Meyers murder - one of 10 slayings committed in the Washington region by Muhammad and his teenage sidekick, Lee Boyd Malvo. All 10 people were shot and killed over the course of 17 days in October 2002. Another three were wounded.

Malvo first claimed to have been the trigger man in each shooting - the trunk of Muhammad's Chevrolet Caprice had been fitted so that a rifle could be sighted and fired by someone lying inside it. That confession eventually was taken back. Muhammad was convicted in Meyers' death not only of homicide but also of homicide committed as an act of terrorism.

His plot, as bizarre as it was, had a jihadist tinge - kill Americans indiscriminately, throw the public into turmoil, extort millions of dollars from the government that would be used to finance further mayhem.

Muhammad had nothing to say as he was hooked up for lethal injection the other night at the Virginia state prison in Jarrett, not far off I-95 and not far from the North Carolina line. He'd already maintained he was innocent, but that wasn't going to fly. The evidence and Malvo's testimony were too compelling; the pair actually had been caught in the sniper-mobile, sleeping at a Maryland rest stop.

Had Muhammad lost his marbles after Army service during the Gulf War? Relatives spoke of a personality change. Crazy with rage, if that's what he was, won't get you very far in front of a Virginia jury.

The death penalty is a fairly easy thing to oppose in the abstract, for all manner of good reasons that we've explored here over the years. Yet it's hard to square that opposition with the sense that John Allen Muhammad, when they strapped him down and stuck him with that needle, was being treated not a bit worse than he deserved.

And what about the Army psychiatrist turned homicidal maniac (the least damning theory) or death-dealing radical Muslim holy warrior, which appears all too likely? If Maj. Nidal Hasan is to be held fully accountable for the Fort Hood massacre, could our sense of appropriate retribution be satisfied with any punishment short of the ultimate?

Army prosecutors don't think so, and they're probably right. Still, there is a distinction between the kind of vengeance we'd like to see exacted against people who harm our loved ones, or our neighbors, or our public servants in uniform, and punishment that serves the larger ends of justice and good public policy.

With most murders, there is precious little uniformity or consistency - like zero - in deciding which killers should be put to death and which not. Some states execute no one; others are pretty aggressive about it. Within a death penalty state such as North Carolina, variations are dramatic from county to county. How can a punishment be fair when it is so arbitrary?

Another death penalty drawback is that the costs of litigation weigh heavily on governments and taxpayers. But without that litigation, the potential for nightmare miscarriages of justice would balloon. North Carolinians have seen instances where, without a full-dress review in the courts, people might well have been executed who didn't deserve to be on Death Row at all.

Perhaps there is a small, separate class of murders so offensive to our national well-being that death should be the default punishment once the wheels of justice have fully turned. They should be federal crimes; a military officer who slays his comrades to make a political point should be eligible, as should a bloody-handed insurrectionist. (Mental illness, if proved, should always be a mitigating factor.)

Yet for all the pain and grief that every murder causes, execution of the culprit scarcely can compensate. The American justice system would become both fairer and more efficient if in most cases - the murders that death penalty laws cannot and do not prevent - death as a punishment were taken off the table.

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