For Lee Millette, his chance to shine in his chosen profession came with the eyes of the entire world on him.
There are probably few things more difficult than presiding over a trial in which the defendant is at risk for the death penalty. Add to that the fact that it’s a high-profile trial, one that the whole world is watching, and it isn’t surprising for a judge to feel that he’ll be judged by the way he conducts himself.
Everything Lance Ito hadn’t been in the O.J. Simpson trial, LeRoy F. Millette Jr. managed to be in the trial of John Allen Muhammad in 2003. Muhammad was one of two men who had terrorized the Washington, D.C., area in a series of sniper shootings in 2002, and several states were eager to try him for one murder or another. Virginia got the first opportunity, and Millette, who was a veteran judge on the Prince William County Circuit Court, got the assignment.
It wasn’t his first rodeo. In 1993, Millette was the judge in the first case involving John Wayne Bobbit and his wife Lorena. It wasn’t the malicious wounding trial in which she had amputated his penis – that came later – but one in which she charged him with marital rape.
“We didn’t have the trial on Court TV,” Millette said. “But there was still tremendous media attention.”
That left him well prepared to preside over the Washington Sniper trial, an experience he calls “amazing” and says was the most interesting thing that ever happened to him. Muhammad and his young companion, Lee Malvo, were wanted in three different states for deaths that had occurred while they were there. Virginia, which had the death penalty, was given the first opportunity to try them.
Millette got the Muhammad trial, and the attention that went with it.
“It was certainly the most interesting thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “It was absolutely the high point of my legal career. Not only was the case a complex and highly emotional one which demanded the best that all the lawyers, court staff, witnesses and the support staff could do, the attention of the entire world was focused on our courtroom for virtually the entire six weeks that we were trying the case.
“It was an amazing experience.”
***
Lee Millette was always a member of the Class of 1967, but he didn’t come to Woodson until September 1965, the beginning of his junior year.
He came from a smaller school, George Washington High in Alexandria, where he had been an all-around athlete, playing football, basketball and tennis as well as running on the track team.
“I didn’t play any interscholastic sports at Woodson, although I was just about the last guy cut from the varsity basketball team my junior and senior years,” Millette said. “In part I think my problem was that I hadn’t hit a growth spurt yet. But I viewed myself as a jock wannabe and I was pretty involved with intramural sports.”
His closest friends were other guys who had come to Woodson as juniors and made names for themselves. Bob Douthitt became student body president and Corky Holmes pitched for the baseball team.
“The thing I noticed most about Lee was that he was very modest and unassuming, but always seemed to exceed expectations,” Douthitt said. “He was also pretty competitive, but tried not to let it show.”
He recalled their PE class from junior year, when nobody in the class knew Millette.
“He was only average sized, in fact a bit slender,” Douthitt said. “But suddenly he was always the agreed-upon quarterback in touch football. When basketball rolled around, he had this really quick shot that he seemed to release from somewhere below his chest, but it was incredibly accurate.”
By his own recollection, Millette sort of took school in stride, whether it was Woodson, William & Mary or the W&M Law School. He had a couple of fascinating near-misses with history, one of them quite fortunate.
“I was in D.C. with my girlfriend visiting the National Zoo when we learned that Martin Luther King had been assassinated,” he said. “We were lucky to get out of D.C. safe and sound before the riots engulfed the city. I remember being kind of nervous that we were just barely able to get out when I saw later on TV how violent things got.”
A little more than a year later, when he was working on a construction site during the summer, a couple of his co-workers offered him tickets and a chance to ride with them to this weekend concert somewhere in upstate New York.
“I was all set to go when my father talked me out of it,” Millette said. “He told me I couldn’t be sure I would get back in time to be at work on Monday. It turned out he was right.”
Still, Millette realized even then he had missed a real opportunity – to go to Woodstock.
Southern campuses were among the last to really feel the ‘60s, and those years at William & Mary were fairly traditional.
“I wasn’t a hippie or a protester,” Millette said. “My fraternity was Pi Kappa Alpha, and the movie ‘Animal House’ could have been filmed at our house. We gatored and had toga parties and drank far too much beer. There was almost certainly some drug use at the campus in those years, but it rarely made it to Fraternity Row, even in the form of marijuana use.”
He majored in economics, mostly because it was interesting to him. His plan always had been to go to law school, something he did directly after graduating.
“My father convinced me it was better to get my education out of the way before taking some time off to see the rest of the world,” Millette said. “Not surprisingly, when I did finish law school there was pressure to get that first job, so any plans to find myself were put on hold again.”
Life was what was happening to him while he was busy making other plans, as John Lennon said. So he got a job and then got a shock.
“After not ever putting 100 percent into school, it was a pleasant revelation to find out how excited I was to actually represent people in court,” Millette said. “It was both a responsibility and an honor to actually represent people in the most serious business in their lives, such as serious criminal charges, custody of their children and injuries from accidents. I found myself putting everything I had into it and working long hours and investing all of my energy into the practice of law.”
So he worked. He had found a job he loved, and he was nearly 30 before he decided to take a break and think about it all. He decided to see the country and reassess what he was doing with his life. So he took his dog Zonker, quit his job, loaded up his Porsche 911 and went out West for three or four months to figure out what to do next.
He put 15,000 miles on his car before he was finished, traveling up into Canada as well as all over the West. He spent a week with high school buddy Art Burton in Salt Lake City and another week with Douthitt and his family in Seattle.
“I got either a card or a call,” Douthitt said. “Lee told me he had quit his job with the law firm and was hitting the road with his dog. “When he arrived he told me he had not had a vacation since he was 15 years old and just needed a break.”
Douthitt said it helped put into perspective how disciplined and committed his friend was, even though he hid it under something of a carefree attitude.
They spent a week or so together, long enough to get several of the women in Douthitt’s office asking him about his amazingly good-looking friend. They played some basketball – “He still had his shot,” Douthitt said – and along with a friend and Zonker, they climbed Mt. Si in the Cascades.
“Lee left town two nights before Mt. St. Helens blew up,” Douthitt said. “I got a card from him later saying he had been camping in Yellowstone and that he woke up the next morning with everything covered in ash.”
Millette was enjoying his vacation, but after a while, he realized that wherever he visited, he was spending time going to courthouses to watch trials. He went home to continue the practice of law.
***
That wasn’t all he did.
In 1981, shortly after his 32nd birthday, Millette met Beth O’Brien. Six months later, to the day, they were married.
“She is the love of my life and my best friend,” he said. “I have tremendous admiration for all that she has accomplished.”
Beth Millette already had a degree in English when she and Lee met. Since then, in addition to raising two children, she has acquired an accounting certificate, a Masters degree in library science, and finally in 2003, a law degree. She practices as an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in charge of gang prosecutions.
“She is a terrific trial lawyer,” her proud husband said.
He certainly sees enough members of the profession to know. Millette was appointed to his first judgeship – as a substitute judge hearing cases in traffic, misdemeanor and small claims court as well as a special justice to handle involuntary mental commitment petitions – when he was just 30.
He became a full-time judge in general district court at the age of 40 and was appointed to the circuit court in Prince William County at age 43.
That’s where he was when the Muhammad case came his way in 2003.
***
Certain things grip the imagination of certain communities in ways that people who don’t live in those communities can ever understand. Seattle was terrified for years by the Green River Killer, Los Angeles had the Night Stalker and few people who lived in New York in 1977 will forget the terror that David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” caused America’s largest city.
Muhammad and Malvo did that to Washington, D.C., and its suburbs in 2002. For three weeks in October, people were afraid to leave their houses. There were seven attacks in the Maryland suburbs, one in Washington and seven in Virginia, including one as far south as Ashland, 90 miles from Washington.
They were captured almost by accident. A trucker phoned in a tip from a rest area off Interstate 70 near Myersville, Md., and police found the two men sleeping in their car.
A year later, Millette got the case.
“It took about a year to try the case,” he said. “There were almost 10 months of pretrial motions that consisted of about 20 days of actual time in court. Then we spent six weeks trying the case in Virginia Beach after a change of venue brought about by the fact that virtually everyone in Prince William County had felt terrorized by the series of shootings so we didn’t feel that we could get an unbiased jury.”
The trial itself was a very big deal. Nearly 600 media credentials were distributed to media outlets to cover it, and 30 or so of those big, RV-type vehicles television networks and stations use for remote broadcasts were parked outside the courthouse.
Despite all the hoopla, Millette managed to avoid a circus-type atmosphere. In fact, he says, he was proud of the fact that once everyone was inside the courtroom, he managed to maintain a regular trial atmosphere.
“We did provide two closed-circuit feeds,” he said. “One was for the media, with work stations set up for about 400 reporters. The other was available for families of the victims and for several victims who had been wounded but not killed.”
He also made a relatively canny decision that turned out very well. He hadn’t allowed Court TV or other outlets to televise the trial, but he did allow photographs from the closed-circuit feed to be made available for both print and electronic media to use.
Millette had decided that by giving the media a little, it made it easier for reporters to follow the restrictions he had set out for them.
“We had a comprehensive media plan outlining all of the aspects of the coverage of the trial,” he said. “For instance, we bused in the jurors from a remote location in a covered bus and prohibited any photos of them or any media mention of the names of any of the potential and later actual jurors.
“A number of the things that we did were somewhat innovative and I have lectured about them to the other circuit judges in Virginia in Continuing Legal Education seminars.”
Maybe the most impressive part of the job he did was being prepared for almost any possibility. It’s probably safe to say that the O.J. Simpson trial, especially the way Ito handled it, haunts many judges.
Would they manage to avoid his pitfalls if such a case ever came their way?
Millette found out.
“We literally did not know whether there would be media pressure to turn the trial into a circus like the O.J. trial had become,” he said. “All that we knew was that we wanted to be prepared for the unexpected.”
The judge and the others involved knew that California justice – particularly Los Angeles justice – had suffered in the eyes of the world from the Simpson debacle. Lance Ito is still a judge in the criminal courts in L.A., but he is also a national punch line. Millette wasn’t about to let that happen.
“Everyone involved in our trial, from the prosecutors to the defense attorneys to the Sheriff’s people to the court clerks to the witnesses, knew that this was going to be a major trial,” he said. “We all wanted Virginia to be seen as a place where even a person charged with the most serious offense could get a fair trial. And we succeeded.”
Muhammad was convicted and given the death penalty by the jury, a sentence Millette confirmed. After some of the high-profile trials in the country that had become ridiculous, Millette won almost universal praise for his handling of this one.
“My biggest regret about the trial is that I turned down an offer from the technicians who were handling the closed-circuit operation to make a tape of the entire trial just for me,” he said. “My concern was that somehow the tape would get out to the media and be released possibly tainting any future trial of Muhammad, but in hindsight I wish that I had that tape. I believe it would have been an invaluable training tool as every aspect of the trial was about as good as I had ever seen, from the jury selection to the opening statements to the presentation of the evidence (it seemed like every witness was one of the top persons in his or her field) to the arguments on the instructions to the closing arguments.
“Everything and everyone was simply top notch. As an aside, I later learned when I started lecturing on how to handle capital cases that the way we handled the issue of mental health issues in mitigation in capital cases was considered to be ‘cutting edge’ according to a professor from a prominent law school.”
Since the trial, Millette has been asked to travel, make speeches and participate in judicial conferences about how best to handle high-level trials. He also got the attention of Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who appointed him to the Virginia Court of Appeals in 2007 and then promoted him to the State Supreme Court less than a year later.
“Judge Millette is a first-rate jurist who has devoted his life to the law,” Kaine said. “His talent is undisputed and his commitment is well-demonstrated.”
The second appointment is for a 12-year term and is contingent on his confirmation by the Virginia General Assembly in 2009. It will enable him to reach retirement age and beyond at the very top of the legal profession in the state, and it isn’t inconceivable that he might catch the attention of some future president and get another promotion.
“When I was 18 I assumed that I would have a family, be a trial lawyer and live a life not unlike my parents’ lives,” Millette said. “The biggest difference is my becoming a judge. I cannot say that I ever expected to have a position that would have an impact on so many people. And of course, I never thought I would ever receive the national attention that came with handling the D.C. sniper case.”
He and his wife have raised two children. Their daughter Lauren teaches English and journalism at Fairfax High School and their son, LeRoy F. Millette III, is nearly finished with his studies at the University of Virginia.
As Millette nears 64, he doesn’t anticipate many changes in his life.
“Other than a problem with my knee caused by wearing down of the cartilage caused by being bowlegged and playing too much basketball and flag football until about two years ago, I feel pretty much the same as I did when I was in high school,” he said. “I expect to be doing the same things at 64 that I have done for the past 40 or so years.”
If there’s one thing Millette knows about being a member of the Class of ’67, it’s that being part of the largest generation in American history meant something. We may not have started the fire, as songster Billy Joel said, but it certainly illuminated our lives.
“To me, the thing that is most interesting about our generation is that the world is always about us,” he said. “Because of our tremendous demographic impact, we have always had an inordinate influence in what is going on in the country. When we were in school, that was the focus of the country’s attention. It was the same when we were young adults and dating and when we had children of our own.”
It’s even true as our generation prepares to pass from the world scene.
“I think that we are a very self-centered and self-oriented generation, probably taking ourselves too seriously,” Millette added. “On the plus side, we have tremendous energy and every time we turn our attention to some aspect of society, we do have the ability to change things, most always for the better but sometimes not.
“But whatever you can say about us, we are above all, always interesting.”
***
As with many of the other pieces, this was written in 2009. Millette served on the Virginia Supreme Court from 2009-2015 before retiring. Quite a few people in our class accomplished a lot. Some became rich, others famous. But with no presidents or governors, Millette occupied a level of his own.
When I ran into him at the 50th anniversary reunion of the Class of 1967 in Manassas in October 2017, there was only one thing I could say to him.
“Lee, you win.”
If a small taco is called a “tacito”, should you call a small Judge – Judge Ito?