Arias Jury Deadlocked Over Death Penalty

by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700

Copyright May 22, 2013
All Rights Reserved.                                         

              Deadlocked on whether or not to send 32-year-old Jodi Arias to death by lethal injection, a Phoenix jury was sent back into deliberations to reach a verdict by Judge Sherry Stephens.  Arias was convicted May 8 of first degree murder for the June 4, 2008 slashing and shooting death of her 30-year-old boyfriend Travis Alexander in a grisly murder involving nearly 30 stab wounds, a .25 caliber bullet to the head and near decapitation from slashing his neck.  “I do not wish or intend to force a verdict,” said Judge Stephens, telling the jury to go back and take more time to arrive at a consensus.  If the jury gets hung in Arizona on a penalty phase for the death penalty, it would require seating a new jury.  If a new jury gets hung, then the judge is forced to assign either a life sentence without or without parole.  However the jury slices it, they can see that the death penalty doesn’t work for Jodi.

             Lead Maricopa County prosecutor Juan Martinez made a powerful case to the jury for the death penalty, calling psychiatric experts pinning Jodi’s diagnosis on Borderline Personality Disorder.  Throughout the five-month-long trial, Arias’s lead attorney Kurt Nurmi vigorously disputed the prosecution’s diagnosis, insisting that Jodi actually suffered from a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from an abusive relationship with Alexander.  Battling back-and-forth through psychiatric experts, you’d think the jury could understand the arcane elements of psychiatric diagnosis.  Whether the prosecutors knew it or not, they made a convincing case to the jury that Arias went into a violent rage, carving Alexander up like a Thanksgiving turkey.  Jurors now hung up on the death penalty understand Aria butchered Alexander, not execution-style, but in a blinding “borderline” rage.

             Cold-blooded killers don’t spend a lot of time in overkill, unnecessarily butchering victims with multiple stab wounds or gunshots unless there’s some emotion behind the murder.  Single gunshots to the back of the head or carnage seen in terrorist attacks like Boston are more indicative of the kind of ruthless premeditation known to trouble the jurors.  Jodi’s jury is hung on the death penalty because they know that Arias, whether a con artist or not, murdered Alexander in a classic fit of passion, whether there was planning or not.  Telling the jury that their decision would be final, Stephens put the jury on notice that picking the death penalty was reserved for murders with special circumstances involving cold-blood. However gruesome the killing, the prosecution went to great pains to paint Arias as a Borderline Personality Disorder, the exact type capable of rage-killings.

              Prosecutors wanted to prove that Arias was the kind of cold-blooded killer that deserved the death penalty.  Their experts spoke eloquently about Arias as a Borderline Personality Disorder, not knowing that violent rages were an essential part of that condition.  Fighting tooth-and-nail over her diagnosis, prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Arias snapped because of her BPD into a blinding rage that resulted in the gruesome killing.  Eight women and four men must now decide whether Arias should be put to death by the state.  While Arias spends time putting on her makeup and talking to the press about her First Degree murder conviction, the jury must cut through the trial’s fog and decide the appropriate punishment for a disordered young woman with a debilitating mental illness that got the better of her.  No one looking at the crime scene could see this as cold-blooded murder.

             When the jury rendered their guilty verdict May 8, Arias went public stating she wanted the death penalty.  Now that the jury’s busy deciding her fate, she’s changed her mind.  “I felt like by asking for death, it’s like asking for assisted suicide, and I didn’t want to do that to my family,” Jodi told the AP.  Pleading with the Jury May 20 for mercy, she talked about how she’d like to help other in prison, including donating her hair to cancer victims.  Whether her sympathies now are real or contrived, it shouldn’t matter to the 12-member panel that must only answer the question of whether her acts warrant the death penalty.  If you follow the prosecutor’s logic, anyone that killed while in a blinding rage should have been convicted of second-degree murder, where passion eclipsed her judgment, resulting in murder.  Telling the jury to look at the horrific crime scene to decide on the death penalty isn’t logical.

             Hung up on the death penalty, the jury figured out what the prosecution and defense couldn’t show them during the trial:  That Arias murdered Alexander in a blinding borderline rage.  Putting her away for life with the possibility of parole after 25 years more closely resembles second-degree murder where mitigating circumstances lessen the penality.  When prosecutors painted the Arias motive as jealous rage of Travis going to Mexico with another woman, they made a powerful case for second-degree murder, certainly not the cold-blooded type that warrants the death penalty.  When the jury finally figures out that Arias massacred Alexander in a fit of jealous rage, putting her to death makes no sense.  “The prosecutor has accused me of wanting to be famous, which is not true,” said Arias, pointing out that the State exaggerated and overreached pushing for murder-one.

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news.  He's editor of OnlineColumnist.com.and author of Dodging the Bullet and Operation Charisma.