The Beltway sniper attacks begin, extending over three weeks.
The D.C. sniper attacks (also known as the Beltway sniper attacks) were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred during three weeks in October 2002 in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area and along Interstate 95 in Virginia.
The snipers were John Allen Muhammad (age 41 at the time) and Lee Boyd Malvo (age 17 at the time), who traveled in a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan. Their crime spree, which began in February 2002, included murders and robberies in the states of Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Washington State, and in Washington, D.C., which resulted in 7 deaths and 7 wounded; in ten months, the snipers killed 17 people and wounded 10 others. None of the killed were children, but one of the wounded was.
In September 2003, Muhammad was sentenced to death, and in October, Malvo, a juvenile, was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences without parole. In November 2009, Muhammad was put to death by lethal injection.
In 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated Malvo's three life sentences without parole in Virginia on appeal, with re-sentencing ordered pursuant to the Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460, 132 S.Ct. 2455 (2012), which held that mandatory life sentences for juvenile criminals without possibility of parole violated the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari, with oral arguments held on October 16, 2019. Should he be resentenced, Malvo's minimum prison sentence will be determined by a judge; the available maximum sentence would be life imprisonment. The ruling does not apply to the six life sentences Malvo received in Maryland. On February 25, 2020, after the passage of a Virginia law allowing those who are serving life sentences for offenses committed before the age of 18 to seek release after serving 20 years, the U.S. Supreme Court case was dismissed at the request of lawyers on both sides.