Malvo Testimony Under Way

The photo flashed on a big screen for jurors was the very picture of innocence: a scrawny boy, neatly dressed in a plaid shirt and dark pants and carrying a Bible.

That boy was Lee Boyd Malvo, before the sniper shootings that terrified the Washington area for three weeks last fall - and before the teenager met his fellow suspect in those killings, John Allen Muhammad.

On Monday, as a jury in Virginia Beach convicted Muhammad of capital murder, another jury in nearby Chesapeake began hearing testimony in the trial of 18-year-old Malvo.

A FBI agent testified that Malvo refused to identify himself and was defiantly silent when he and Muhammad were arrested in October 2002 at a highway rest stop.

FBI agent Charles Pierce, leader of the team that arrested the pair, described how agents took Malvo and Muhammad by surprise at the rest stop in Maryland, smashing two of the windows in their car. Malvo was asleep in the front seat and Muhammad was in the back, Pierce said.

Pierce said he asked Malvo four times to give his name, and Malvo refused.

"I would characterize it as defiant silence," Pierce said when prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. asked him to describe Malvo's attitude.

Pierce also said FBI agents looked for explosives in the car because they knew Muhammad had experience as a military engineer. They did not find any, he said.

Under cross-examination by defense attorney Michael Arif, Pierce acknowledged that Malvo did not resist arrest.

The defense tactics in each case are markedly different. Muhammad, when he briefly acted as his own lawyer, said in his opening statement that the evidence would show he did not commit the crimes.

Malvo is charged in the Oct. 14, 2002, slaying of Linda Franklin outside a Home Depot store. He faces two counts of capital murder, one alleging multiple murders in the Washington area and another charging that he engaged in a form of terrorism. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

Malvo's lawyers told jurors they would not suggest authorities had the wrong man. However, they say Malvo is innocent by reason of insanity, contending he was brainwashed by Muhammad, the 42-year-old Army veteran he looked up to as a father figure.

Malvo's attorneys showed pictures and stressed his background during their nearly two-hour opening statement Thursday. They described Malvo's unhappy upbringing in Jamaica, where his mother frequently left him with relatives or strangers as she moved around looking for work.

As a boy, he once threatened to hang himself after his mother left him, defense attorney Craig Cooley said. The bullied, obedient boy once confided to a woman he was living with that he had nothing, "not even a dog, not even a bird," Cooley said.

The defense showed jurors photos of Malvo throughout his childhood, both alone and with his mother and the father he rarely saw after his parents split up when he was 5.

It could be difficult for the defense to undermine what appears to be an overwhelming amount of evidence against Malvo, including DNA and fingerprint evidence and a confession to police in which prosecutors say Malvo bragged about the shootings, said Andrew Sacks, a defense attorney who has handled prominent murder cases in Virginia.

"They are really making a play to save his life" by planting the idea that Malvo was a child who was manipulated, he said.

"Even if that (insanity) defense doesn't fly, it gives them the opportunity to begin sensitizing the jury to the human side of their client," Sacks said.

That approach could work, given that the jury includes several people with ties to children, including a teacher, a retired teacher, a retired assistant principal and a lunchroom monitor, said Donald H. Smith, an Old Dominion University sociology professor who studies jury behavior.

Such people probably have dealt with troubled children, making them less likely to respond cynically to the defense's argument, Smith said.