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Jeffrey Toobin: Jurisdiction tussles among legal issues in sniper case
(CNN) -- The arrest early Thursday morning of two males in connection with the Washington, D.C.-area sniper shootings has set off a legal timetable, as well as raising significant legal questions. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin spoke with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer about the legal aspects of the case. WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: What is happening as far as you can tell, Jeff, right now? JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Let's start with the easy part about what's going to go on right this (Thursday) afternoon. The suspects have been arrested since last night. Usually within 24 hours, they need to be arraigned. And they are going to be arraigned on federal complaints. They are going to be in federal court in Baltimore. According to your conversations with (CNN Correspondent) Kelli Arena, there are going to be federal gun charges that are pre-existing, I believe, against John Muhammad. And John Malvo, the younger person, is going to be arraigned as a material witness. These are very clearly initial charges. They are not ... I don't think they are going to wind up being only charged with this. But the question that will be dealt with today is simply the question of bail. And I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb here by saying there is no chance these two guys are going to get out on bail. So basically, what's going to happen today is they will enter initial pleas of not guilty, certainly, they'll be assigned lawyers, and then a 30-day clock will start running. And it's by the end those 30 days the federal government or some other government -- and that's where things start to get complicated -- will have to bring more formal charges against them. BLITZER: And there's going to be, I think it's fair to say, Jeffrey, a competition between local, state and federal authorities over who is eventually going to be in charge of prosecuting these two suspects. TOOBIN: Well, Wolf, when I was a prosecutor we sometimes used to joke somewhat ruefully that we fought other prosecutors in other jurisdictions sometimes harder than we fought the bad guys. At least that's what we worried about. Because there often are turf battles among prosecutors. Here you have really a three-way situation. You have the federal government. Obviously, they have the most resources; they usually win turf battles. What's odd about this case is that -- it's not really odd, but just because of the nature of the case -- it's a murder case, and murder is usually prosecuted at the state level, not at the federal level. So it will be interesting to see if federal prosecutors can construct a case so that the whole crime winds up in federal court. Then you have Maryland and Virginia. Both states had murders in them. Both have very legitimate claims to prosecuting this case. The way the turf battles work is you'll see prosecutors from both sides saying, 'No, we have the better case, we have a stronger case in Montgomery County. Those are the good cases; we should bring that first.' Or the prosecutors in Virginia will say, 'No, the case in Richmond is really the best case; let's bring that case first.' What will be an important background in that turf battle is that Maryland is in the middle of a moratorium on the death penalty. The governor there has said that state is not executing anyone until the state has learned whether it is performing adequate due process, whether the state is giving all people accused of the death penalty a fair shake. Virginia has a very active death penalty operation. Lots of people are executed there. They rank among the highest states. That is surely, if in fact these charges proceed, will be an argument both sides will make. BLITZER: And the federal -- all of our viewers will remember briefly, Jeffrey, that Timothy McVeigh when the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing case -- death penalty involved federal prosecution. So there are precedents for the federal prosecutors taking charge of a murder case. TOOBIN: Absolutely. And there is a federal death penalty law. It's worth noting, though, that there have only been two executions under the federal death penalty law. The federal death penalty really came back in the mid-90s, and McVeigh and one other person are the only people who have been executed so far. There are a couple dozen people, I believe on federal death row, but it is not a fast-moving process, and certainly, in Virginia, a state with much smaller jurisdiction than the federal government, has executed a lot more people than the U.S. government has.
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