CHRISTIANSBURG -- Former Chesterfield County resident William Morva, who killed two men during a 2006 jail escape in Montgomery County, was sentenced to death yesterday. But first, he declared his innocence, prophesied society's violent overthrow, and announced his new name is "Nemo."

As his attorneys watched nervously, Morva said: "I'm an innocent person, and I shouldn't have to defend myself."

"My name is Nemo," Morva added in the middle of the two-minute, muddled rant in Montgomery Circuit Court, explaining that he was discarding his given name because it is a "slave name."

His mother, Elizabeth Morva of Prince George County, wept as her 26-year-old son criticized everyone in the courtroom as sycophants and hypocrites.

"You people, your whole society, you go and sleep at night with smiles on your faces because you get away with all the evil stuff you do," he said. "You may kill me, that's guaranteed. There are others like me, and some day they're going to get together, and they're going to sweep over your civilization and wipe these smiles off your faces."

Morva said he was not intimidated by the prosecution or the court, and he vowed not to ask for mercy. His tirade was interrupted briefly when the widow of one of his victims rose from her front-row seat and yelled at him using profanities that prompted deputies to surround her.

"You didn't show any mercy when you took my husband from me and our children," Cindy McFarland said. "You deserve to burn in hell."

At Judge Ray Wilson Grubbs' order, the deputies gently escorted McFarland from the courtroom.

In August 2006, Morva was an inmate in the Montgomery jail, awaiting trial on robbery charges, when he escaped a deputy's custody after being taken to a nearby hospital.

Morva, using the deputy's gun, shot and killed unarmed hospital security guard Derrick McFarland, 32, as he fled the hospital. The next day, he shot Montgomery sheriff's deputy Eric Sutphin, 40, from behind as Sutphin searched for him along a walking trail in Blacksburg.

A jury in March convicted Morva of capital murder and recommended the death penalty.

When Morva concluded his speech yesterday, Grubbs had Cindy McFarland brought back into the courtroom and then sentenced Morva to death. He set an execution date of Oct. 21. However, Virginia's automatic appeals process means Morva probably will not be executed for years.

At his trial, a psychiatrist testified that Morva suffers from a personality disorder that makes him overly suspicious and obsessive about his health. His lawyers, Tony Anderson and Thomas Blaylock, tried to convince jurors that his deadly jail escape was a product of the disorder because it made him believe he was going to die in jail.

Morva, who did not testify at his trial, said yesterday that defense claims that he was mentally unbalanced, narcissistic and lacked empathy were "completely bogus."

Outside the courtroom after the hearing, Cindy McFarland had calmed down enough to say of Morva, "I'm still trying to comprehend exactly what he thought he was saying." Other courtroom observers were equally baffled by Morva's rant.

"I didn't expect anything different from him," said Harold McFarland, Derrick McFarland's father.

Before Morva was jailed for a series of bungled robbery attempts in 2005, he was known in Blacksburg as a pleasant, barefoot hippie who hung around coffeehouses, worked odd jobs only long enough to buy food, and spent nights on friends' couches.

Friends recalled that Morva constantly talked of wanting to live barefoot in a forest, and occasionally he said he would like to fight a bobcat. Several testified he seemed to become mentally unstable after his father died in 2004.

"He's mentally ill -- he's mentally ill, and why can't anybody see that?" his distraught mother said outside the courtroom. "He is more mentally ill than anyone realizes or wants to realize."

Elizabeth Morva said she wished she had been called to testify at her son's March trial, because she would have tried to make jurors understand that her son is profoundly mentally ill. William Morva, though, told his attorneys not to call her to the stand, she said.

"William is mentally ill," she said. "He was not like this as a child. William is seriously, mentally ill. He wanted to fight bobcats. This is not normal. This is not normal thinking."

Contact Rex Bowman at (540) 344-3612 or rbowman@timesdispatch.com.