Death sentence the only justice in John Allen Muhammad case

Kill him next week or kill him some time thereafter, but John Allen Muhammad has to die, no matter what his lawyers say.

Muhammad was convicted in Virginia for the murder of Dean Meyers in October of 2002. Meyers’ death was part of a four-state, one-city (the District of Columbia) killing spree. Lee Boyd Malvo, who was then in his teens and is now serving a life sentence for the crime, was the triggerman in the murderous rampage that left 10 dead. But Muhammad was the mastermind pulling the strings.

And if we can’t execute a guy responsible for 10 murders, then what good is the death penalty?

Opponents of capital punishment would answer with a resounding “none!” of course, and as usual they’d be wrong. One thing the death penalty is certain to do, and that is to keep murderers from killing again. And as much as death-penalty opponents don’t like to admit it, many murderers on death row aren’t there for their first killing, but for at least their second.

Muhammad’s lawyers claim that the trial judge didn’t allow expert testimony that would have shown their client suffered from brain damage incurred from childhood beatings and that the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence.

That childhood abuse left Muhammad sane enough to join the U.S. Army, attain the rank of sergeant and serve in the first Gulf war. His attorneys have already asked Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine for clemency, and the Old Dominion state’s chief executive might just want to ponder why Muhammad’s mental illness didn’t manifest itself in the early 1990s, but somehow popped up around 2002.

No, Muhammad is not my ideal case for a murderer who should be strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection. There are others who I’d like to see get what we Marylanders call the “Thanos cocktail” before Muhammad. (Murderer John Thanos was the first death-row inmate in our state to die by lethal injection.)

I’d like to see any gang leader — be he from the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerilla Family, Nuestra Familia, MS-13, Mexican Mafia, Bloods, Crips — who murders in prison or orders murders while in prison be executed sooner rather than later.

Ditto for those inmates who murder corrections officers. That happened to corrections Officer David McGuinn at the Maryland House of Correction more than three years ago. The two suspects in that case haven’t even gone to trial yet. In the meantime, Maryland’s governor and legislators have made it all but impossible for either to get the death penalty.

Muhammad was captured in Maryland; unfortunately for him, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft managed to get him shipped out of the “kill our corrections officers with impunity” state and sent to Virginia. He may not be my ideal candidate for execution next week, but with 10 bodies under his belt he’ll just have to do until somebody better comes along.

That means, basically, that I don’t buy his attorneys’ claims about his mental incompetence. That killing spree he organized was too well-planned and too well-executed for Muhammad to be anything but mentally competent. Muhammad is mentally competent, all right.

And if there’s any justice in this world, by this time next week, he’ll also be dead.

Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.