Second sniper trial opens

last updated 8 January 2015

Chesapeake, Va.

Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger of the two men accused of last year’s sniper killings around Washington, D.C., pleaded innocent this week to one of the 10 murders. Defense lawyers said that Malvo, 18, had been brainwashed by the older suspect, John Allen Muhammad, and was thus not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyers plan to introduce notes the teenager scribbled in his cell suggesting he had been influenced by the Matrix movie series—in which people’s lives are scripted by all-powerful computers. “You are a slave to the Matrix control,” he wrote. Malvo and Muhammad, 42, are being tried in separate courtrooms for two different murders in the shooting spree, which terrorized much of the nation.