Lawyers for juvenile sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo...

Lawyers for juvenile sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo challenged the constitutionality of Virginia's death penalty law.
Malvo was scheduled for a March 3 pre-trial hearing in the murder case stemming from the October 14 shooting death of Linda Franklin.
In filing a motion to dismiss, defence attorneys argued that the Virginia death penalty law is unconstitutionally vague. The law allows a jury to impose the death penalty if it finds that a defendant's crime is "outrageously or wantonly vile" or that the defendant would commit future crimes that "would constitute a continuing serious threat to society."
Those provisions "do not provide the sentencer with meaningful instruction to avoid the arbitrary and capricious infliction of a death sentence," defence lawyer Michael Arif wrote.
Malvo was scheduled to go on trial in November in the death of Franklin. He and John Allen Muhammad, 42, stand accused of shooting 19 people, killing 13 and wounding six in Maryland, Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and Washington, D.C.