Milestones Dec. 8, 2003

SENTENCED TO DEATH. JOHN ALLEN MUHAMMAD, 42, after being found guilty on two counts of capital murder (one conviction was under a new state antiterrorism law) in the first trial resulting from last fall's D.C.-area sniper killings that left 10 dead; in Virginia Beach, Va.

DIED. HAL WALKER, 70, first African-American correspondent for CBS News; of complications from prostate cancer; in Reston, Va. A New York State public-relations executive when CBS hired him in 1963, Walker covered the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the funeral of Robert F. Kennedy and the Iranian hostage crisis during more than three decades in TV news.

DIED. TEDDY WILBURN, 71, half of the country-music duo the Wilburn Brothers; of congestive heart failure; in Nashville, Tenn. He and older brother Doyle first performed publicly at ages 5 and 6 with three older siblings. But the pair eventually broke off to form one of the most popular country-music acts of the '50s and '60s, recording hits like Roll Muddy River and Trouble's Back in Town. Later they became savvy talent managers, sparking the careers of Loretta Lynn and Patty Loveless.

DIED. EUGENE KLEINER, 80, gentlemanly, Austrian-born Silicon Valley engineer and venture capitalist; of heart failure; in Los Altos Hills, Calif. In 1957, with $3,500 and seven colleagues, he came up with a way to mass-produce silicon transistors, a discovery that opened the door to developing desktop computers and cell phones and spawned companies like Intel. In 1972, he co-founded Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a venture-capital firm that helped establish more than 300 companies, including Compaq and Sun Microsystems.

DIED. HUGH KENNER, 80, scholar and critic who was a leading authority on such standard-bearers of literary modernism as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and, especially, Ezra Pound; after suffering from heart problems; in Athens, Ga. The author of 25 books (and a contributor to 200), Kenner avoided the jargon of academia in favor of an often witty, idiosyncratic style. He described his 1971 book, The Pound Era, on the poet's contribution to the birth of modernism, as "an X-ray moving picture of how our epoch was extricated from the fin de siecle."

DIED. FRED TURNER, 81, lawyer who successfully represented Clarence Earl Gideon after the Supreme Court overturned his earlier conviction, in a landmark 1963 case that established the right of every defendant in a criminal case to an attorney; in Panama City, Fla. Gideon, unable to afford an attorney, unsuccessfully defended himself and was convicted of breaking into a pool hall. In a new trial, Turner won Gideon's acquittal, proving the value of a public-defender system that has since become an essential part of our legal system.