RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — One of the biggest mistakes of convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad might have been extending his killing spree to Virginia, the only state in which death sentences are carried out more often than not.

A Virginia Beach jury recommended on Monday that Muhammad should be executed for orchestrating the sniper attacks that terrorized the Washington region last fall. His alleged accomplice, 18-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo, is being tried on capital murder charges in Chesapeake.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft sent Muhammad and Malvo to Virginia for trial because of the state's history of carrying out executions, but Virginia's death penalty system has been criticized by a civil rights group that says it is so flawed that a moratorium is needed until changes are made.

A spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Kilgore said Virginia's judicial system is efficient.

"I don't know how things work in other states, but in Virginia we have a very tightly drawn death penalty statute that has been tested and retested at every level of the judicial system," said spokesman Tim Murtaugh. "We have excellent, and in many cases veteran, prosecutors and juries that know the law."

From 1977 through 2002, Virginia executed 64 percent of the 137 people sentenced to death in the state, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Missouri was a distant second at 35 percent, followed by Texas at 31 percent.

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a report earlier this month that recommended a moratorium on executions. The report says prosecutorial misconduct goes unchecked and that indigent defendants often are represented by ill-prepared, poorly compensated and even incompetent lawyers.

Virginia also makes it tougher than any other state for a death row inmate to win on appeal, the report says. Evidence of innocence, except for DNA evidence, cannot be presented more than 21 days after sentencing. Next year, the state legislature will consider proposals to eliminate or relax the rule, which is the strictest in the nation.

Critics of Virginia's system also note that the Virginia Supreme Court and the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals virtually always deny relief to death row appellants, often because of procedural issues like missed deadlines or failure to raise a claim at trial.

"Being a stickler on procedural technicalities has been kind of a hallmark of review in Virginia," said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about a third of the 7,254 people sentenced to death nationwide from 1976 through 2002 had their sentences overturned. In Virginia, the reversal rate is less than 10 percent.

Virginia also is exceptionally swift in administering the death penalty. The average time between a death sentence and an execution in Virginia is about five years, roughly half the national average.

"They do pride themselves in moving cases quickly," Dieter said.

Executions have outpaced death sentences in recent years — 14 inmates were executed in 1999 alone — shrinking the death row population by more than half. The 27 inmates currently on Virginia's death row have been there an average of 2.8 years, the shortest stay of any state.

Bruce Williamson, president of the Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, said efficiency is a worthwhile goal but not making a fatal mistake is more important.

He cited the case of Earl Washington, who was pardoned by Gov. Jim Gilmore in 2000 after new tests on DNA evidence cleared him of a 1982 rape and murder.

"We have a system run by humans, and we are all imperfect and flawed individuals," Williamson said. "We make mistakes. Earl Washington is alive today only because of a dedicated group of people determined to prove his innocence."

But Murtaugh said Washington's eventual exoneration proves Virginia's system contains adequate safeguards for the innocent.

Williamson, former president of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, is not convinced.

"For every Earl Washington, how many innocent people have been executed who didn't have people to champion their cause?" Williamson asked.