I think first-degree murder is probably a reach, but two counts of manslaughter at the very least. This guy's facing a long stretch (decades) in the pen.
From the "I have nothing else to do so I'm going to post too much about this file."
At one time I probably knew more about West Virginia's homicide jurisprudence than anyone else. It is a horrible subject in that the code doesn't define anything. It just sets forth penalties and classifications for different types of homicide. Everything else is in case law, and WV's appellate court has not exactly been dedicated to any sort of logical consistency.
This seems textbook first degree murder as read. If his personal justification is only "they were on my land," then he's just ignorant about the law, which isn't a defense/mitigation to murder. Premeditation, intent, malice, gang's all here. I'll admit I've never come across a cold blooded killing where the killer honestly thought it was legal, so an argument that this is somehow not malicious would be a new one, but I don't think it legally flies. Malice is a weird animal in that under the common law (which WV uses) it is mostly defined in terms of absence, as I get to in a few paragraphs. One can read all sorts of old definitions of malice and not really get a clear picture of what it means. It basically means, in this context, that you meant to kill someone without a good reason. Although not quite that simple. Most sane states have rewritten criminal law to remove these sort of archaic and vague terms, but a few haven't. WV is one.
Which is the thing here, absent some other mental process we don't know about, believing it is legal to kill someone doesn't make the act any less loopy because it isn't like he would have a duty to kill someone. He's acting with malice, killing those no immediate threat to him, legal or not. That the statute doesn't bail him out is of no accord as to that.
Depending on additional facts, who knows. He might possibly have an insanity plea; if I were handling the case the first thing that happens is I have him evaluated in case he is actual legally psycho whacko rather than just way too much right wing gun propaganda whacko.
Second degree is right out, as there is clear premeditation here. I'll not bore with the details, but in essence the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals has defined Second Degree out of existence anyway. Not worth worrying about. Maybe I'll bore anyway. Second Degree is basically First Degree without premeditation. Problem is, in practice the time frame for "premeditating" as per court decisions can be more or less almost an instant so the concept is meaningless.
I could perhaps come up with a few silly arguments for manslaughter. For manslaughter you have to negate malice, which usually happens in two ways. One is imperfect self defense, where a person uses deadly force honestly believing it to be in self defense when same is not justified. The other is heat of passion. The classic example here is the husband come home, sees his wife in bed with another man, and starts shooting.
So if he decides to claim he was somehow scared for his life or that he was in a blind rage for some reason, maybe manslaughter, but this seems a massive stretch.
It will probably plead out to something anyway. My guess at this point would be plea to one first degree murder with a recommendation of mercy, meaning the prosecutor asks the judge to give the guy 15 to life rather than life with no parole. Maybe plea to two seconds which would be a 20-80 year sentence. Generally plea deals revolve around trying to engineer a sentence acceptable to both sides, so that this is clearly not a second degree murder wouldn't matter...
All of this is subject to further data, of course.
