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. ~ ■ —. University of South Carolina MONDAY OfTflRFR OR 0000 Vol.96.No.31 www.dailygamecock.com IVIUINUMT, UL/IUDLlX £.0, AKJKJz. Since 1908 , Stiffer jurisdiction urged for sniper trial BY BRIAN WITTE THE ASSOCIATED PHESS ROCKVILLE, MD. - A grow ing number of officials said Sunday that the state of Maryland should defer prose cution of fhe two sniper sus pects to another jurisdiction where the death penalty could be more easily applied. ^ “Wherever the case is ™ strongest, with the stiffest penal ties, that’s where they need to go,” said Douglas Duncan, the top elected official in Maryland’s Montgomery County, where the rampage began Oct. 2 and where six people were slain. John Allen Muhammad, 41, and teenager John Lee Malvo were to be charged on Monday in Virginia, where three of the killings took place. The suspects already face multiple murder charges in Maryland, and mur Hprpliflrfrpt: in Alahomp nnrp. lated to the sniper shootings. They also could be charged with federal extortion and murder counts that could bring the death penalty. Duncan told The Associated %! Press on Sunday that prosecu tors should present a “unified front” in bringing the case to the toughest venue. “I hope that’s what they do,” he said. His comments were among the first from Maryland officials suggesting the state defer pros ecution to another jurisdiction. Montgomery County State’s Attorney Douglas Gansler told the AP on Sunday that he still believes his state should prose cute the case first, but “we’re open to discussions with all the jurisdictions.” Gansler acknowledged that the toughest sentence Malvo could get in Maryland would be ^ life without the possibility of pa role, but argued that his state has the strongest case because it suffered the heaviest losses. The Justice Department sug gested Sunday it is unlikely Maryland will be the first juris diction to try the sniper sus pects, who remain in federal custody on federal firearms and material witness warrants is sued before their capture. Maryland “comes in dead last” in terms of the strength of its law on the death penalty, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Virginia and Alabama may be more likely than Maryland to carry out executions. Maryland has put just three people to death, and all execu tions have been suspended un der a moratorium imposed by Gov. Parris Glendening. And a 17-year-old would be eligible for the death penalty in Virginia and Alabama but not in Maryland. Virginia also has more avenues than Maryland for seeking the death penalty, including a new post-Sept. 11 provision that allows for exe cution when the killer has “in tent to intimidate the civilian population at large.” Federal law enforcement au thorities are reviewing possible charges relating to extortion and murder that might allow for all the shootings to be com bined in a single case and would allow for the death penalty on conviction, the official said. Letters left behind in the sniper slayings demanded $10 million. The Justice Department offi cial also pointed to the possibil ity of a federal trial in Maryland. Under such a choice, “you have the benefit of being in the Maryland community” where most of the shootings oc curred, said the official. Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” said his state would be best positioned to prosecute because it can more easily apply the death penalty. “You know, we have the death penalty for both parties. We can try this juvenile as an adult and subject him to the death penal ♦ SNIPER, SEE PAGE 2 “We have the death penalty for both parties. We can try this juvenile as an adult and subject him to the death penalty, and we can move on quickly.” Investigators remove Items from the yard of a home In Tacoma, Wash., Thursday as they look for evidence related to recent shootings by a sniper In the Washington, D.C., area. USC symposium encourages religious tolerance in public schools and society BY WENDY JEFFCOAT THE GAMECOCK USC held a symposium this past weekend to address ways to overcome religious intolerance in American society and public schools. Carl Evans, chairman of the Religious Studies Department at USC and director of Partners in Dialogue, said the event’s pur pose was to examine how a civil society deals constructively with diversity, mainly within public schools. “We are a society that is be coming increasingly diverse, re ligiously and culturally,” Evans said, “and this diversity is pos ing new challenges for how we live together in this society, with good order and harmony.” “This is an attempt to come to terms with some important de velopments in the changing de mographic landscape of America so that we can pool our knowl edge and our resources in order to learn how to deal with diver sity in a constructive way,” he said. ♦ SYMPOSIUM, SEE PAGE 3 PHOTO BY CANDI HAUGLUM/THE GAMECOCK Zohra Arastu, right, is a member of Masjid al-Muslimi. Index Comics and Crossword 7 Classifieds 10 Horoscopes 7 Letters to the Editor _4 Online Poll 4 ^ Police Report 2 Weather TODAY TOMORROW High 66 High 70 Low 60 Low 59 Inside ♦ ON THE WEB Read state, nation and world briefs. www.dallygamecock.com ♦ NEWS With flu season in full swing, the Student Health Center offers vaccines. Page 3 ♦THE MIX EL-P becomes an entrepreneur with the creation of the Def Jux record label. Page 5 ♦ SPORTS The volleyball team loses to Florida in a match of teams unbeaten in the SEC. Page 8 Teen suspected in Okla. shooting spree BY NICK TROUGAKOS THE ASSOCIATED PRESS SALLISAW, OKU. - A teenag er apparently upset by com plaints about his driving shot four neighbors, including a 2 year-old girl, then went on a 20 mile shooting spree, apparently targeting people at random, po lice said. Two of the victims died. Daniel Fears, 18, was arrest ed after losing control of his pickup truck and crashing near a police roadblock, authorities said. As police cars surrounded him, he threw out a 20-gauge shotgun and surrendered, said Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Kym Koch. Authorities hadn’t deter mined a motive for the Saturday rampage, in which 10 people were shot, but police said they thought Fears became angry when a neighbor scolded him for ♦ SHOOTING, SEE PAGE 2 Gas fells hostages in Russia 116 deaths cloud rescue effort in Moscow theater BY DAVID MCHUGH THE ASSOCIATED PRESS MOSCOW — A mysterious knockout gas killed 116 hostages after Russian special forces stormed a Moscow theater to free them from Chechen terrorists, casting a shadow on what was first seen as a triumphant rescue operation. More than 150 more hostages were in critical condition Sunday, the chief Moscow city doctor said. The physician in charge of the city’s poison unit said troops did not tell medical authorities they had gassed the auditorium until the 750 hostages were brought out, most of them unconscious. “But we didn’t know the char acter of the gas,” said Yevgeny Luzhnikov, head of the city health service Department of Severe Poisoning. The substance was de scribed as akin to compounds used in surgical anesthesia. The gas affected hearts and lungs, said Andrei Seltsovsky, the chief city physician. He said he had no information when asked about reports that the compound could cause vomiting that would choke unconscious victims. “In standard situations, the com pound ... does not act as aggres sively as it turned out to do,” Seltsovsky said. “But it was used on people who were in a specific (ex treme) situation for more than 50 hours.... All of this naturally made the situation more difficult.” White House officials would not ♦ HOSTAGES, SEE PAGE 2 GRAPHIC BY SHAWN ROURK/THE GAMECOCK High-level duo teams up for USC research Research Series This story is part one of a two-part series that will continue Wednesday. BY KEVIN FELLNER THE GAMECOCK If you look at President Andrew Sorensen’s resume, you might get it mixed up with that of Interim Vice President for Research Harris Pastides. Both have taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Both have an exten sive background in biomedical research. Both are public-health experts. But Sorensen and Pastides share more than just similar job skills — they also have a vision of USC in the top 50 public re search universities in the nation. With all their similarities, the two men are working together to hammer out plans to get USC to that status. Already, the duo has garnered such national awards as last week’s nearly $1 million grant to study bioterrorism and the previous week’s $11 million grant — the largest grant in the school’s history — to study col orectal cancer. Sorensen and Pastides don’t hesitate to tell their colleagues and faculty members that, with two ex perienced researchers at the con trols, the amount of nationally rec ognized research done at USC can be expected to increase dramati cally in the near future. Federal grants Sorensen and Pastides agree that funding for biomedical re search must come from federal sources — namely the National Institutes of Health, which Pastides estimates has a research budget of about $25 billion, and the National Science Foundation. Sorensen said this type of fund ing just doesn’t fall into a univer sity’s lap. He said USC needs not only to step up its efforts to apply for such funding but also to change ♦ RESEARCH, SEE PAGE 3