A federal appeals court threw out the four life sentences that Lee Boyd Malvo received for his role in the 2002 Beltway sniper shootings that occurred in Virginia when he was 17, reports the Washington Post. The unanimous ruling from the three-judge panel cites the 2012 Supreme Court decision that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole are unconstitutional for juveniles. The court later made that decision retroactive. Malvo would face new sentencing hearings in two jurisdictions in Virginia. He pleaded guilty in Spotsylvania County and agreed to two life sentences without parole, and was convicted by a jury in Chesapeake and given the same punishment. The convictions still stand. Under Virginia law, the jury in Chesapeake had only two possible sentences to weigh for the capital murder convictions: death or life in prison without parole.
Virginia’s attorney general can ask the entire U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit to rehear the case, appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court or move forward with new sentencing hearings. Malvo, 33, and John Allen Muhammad also killed six people in the Maryland suburbs of Washington during a three-week period that terrorized the region. Muhammad was executed in Virginia in 2009. Thursday’s ruling does not apply to the six life sentences Malvo received in Maryland after he pleaded guilty to six murder charges. A judge upheld the sentences, saying there was not a requirement to impose a sentence of life without parole. In the Virginia case, three judges wrote that their conclusions were made “not with any satisfaction but to sustain the law.” The judges called the shootings “the most heinous, random acts of premeditated violence conceivable, destroying lives and families and terrorizing the entire Washington, D.C., metropolitan area for over six weeks, instilling mortal fear daily in the citizens of that community.”