Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars

O
n the morning of Jodi Ann Arias’ sentencing, I woke up early. It’s not every day that seven years’ worth of work comes to an end, and this was like the ending of a bad relationship. The only things left to say were the words that Arias did not want to hear.

It had all begun on June 4, 2008, the day Arias’ victim and former boyfriend, Travis Alexander, had been brutally murdered. And now, after years of motions and discovery, appearances and court dates, a conviction of first-degree murder, and two hung juries tasked with deciding whether Arias should receive the death penalty, we were back at the courthouse on April 13, 2015, ready to hear the sentence as determined by the judge. In the aftermath of the hung juries, the death penalty was no longer an option, but the judge could send her to prison for either natural life or life with the possibility of release after twenty-five years.

Courtroom 5C of the Maricopa County Superior Court was packed to capacity, as it had been for much of the trial. There had never been a crowd like this in our courtrooms—the interest in the case was unprecedented. Maybe it was the attractive defendant and the handsome victim, or the fact that they were both Mormon, or the buzz about the kinky sexual relationship between them. Whatever the reason, there were always more people than there were seats, and eventually it had gotten to the point where people started lining up early in the morning just to get in.

I took the same chair at the counsel table that I had taken every day during the trial. Looking around the room, I realized that I’d spent years of my life here—the judge’s bench in front of me, jury box to my left, and defense table to my right. I glanced across the courtroom at Arias. It was hard to reconcile her to the woman she was at the start of all this. She was still a brunette, only now her hair was laced with strings of gray. She looked older in other ways, too, from the glasses she wore to the wrist brace on her left arm. But more than physical appearances, I couldn’t help but think about her untruthful side, and the different airs she’d worn.

Arias had always struck me as the “bad waitress” type. I imagined her at the Purple Plum, a restaurant in Yreka, California, where she had once worked. She would probably be looking down at her customers, smiling at them with a fake happy look, like she always did, giving them bad service. It was easy to see her spending her days taking photos, pouring weak coffee, and dreaming of a different life. Instead she was standing in front of a judge ready to be sentenced for the premeditated murder of Travis Alexander.

Even now, I could picture her saying, “Judge, it wasn’t my fault,” just as she might say to her customers, “It’s not my fault the coffee is cold.” I had never heard her take responsibility for anything, and I didn’t expect to hear her take responsibility today.

The proceedings got under way at 8:40
A.M.
, with the bailiff calling the courtroom to order and the judge announcing the case.

“It is now time to enter judgment and sentence,” the judge said. “It is the judgment of the court that the defendant Jodi Ann Arias is guilty of the crime of first-degree murder.”

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sherry Stephens had been with us through it all, witnessing up close the heated exchanges that marked so much of the case. She turned to me and asked if I had any comments.

I had something to say, but protocol was to let Travis Alexander’s family members speak first. They were in the front row, on the left side of the courtroom, as they had been for the duration of the trial. The three rows behind them were filled with those members of the media who were able to get a seat. The overflow media used another room equipped with closed-circuit television.

Travis’ aunt Heather spoke first. His sisters Hilary, Tanisha, and Samantha were next. Their statements were difficult and emotional, and I felt the weight of their loss as I rose to make my statement.

“Hope is never a bad thing,” I started. “Hope is always a good thing. . . . The family of Travis Alexander, as you heard, hoped that a death sentence would be imposed by this case, but that is not to be. That will not happen . . . [but] they still have hope. They have hope now that you will see your way to a natural life sentence. . . . As they have told you, when they think of the stabbing, they can feel their brother’s pain. They can feel the blade going into him and it burns them. When they feel him moving away, trying to get away from [Arias] as she continually stabbed him, they can hear his cries, his screaming. It rings in their ears and it’s something they cannot stop.”

After my statement, Arias’ mother rose to talk on her behalf, and as expected she defended her daughter.

Finally it was Arias’ chance to speak. From the start of the trial, people had wanted to see how I would handle the cunning, manipulative defendant who had the ability to be sympathetic and demure at a moment’s notice. I knew I had been able to cut through her posturing and expose her for who she really was—a cold-hearted murderer who refused to own up to the especially cruel crime she’d committed. I had been hard on her, but I had to be. I had prosecuted 181 jury trials, seventy-two of which involved a charge of murder, but I had never seen a defendant quite as calculating as the woman standing before the judge now. If I’d allowed her to dictate the pace of the ques
tioning during cross-examination, she might have had her way and gotten away with murder.

Her statement was much shorter than I had anticipated. Of course, as I had predicted, she still refused to take responsibility for anything. Instead she was the victim.
She
had had to defend herself during the over-the-top murder of Travis.
She
had had to protect his reputation both while they were dating and in the days and months after his death.
She
was not the one who wanted the case to go to trial, but Travis’ sisters had rejected plea-bargaining.
She
was the one who needed sympathy, even pointing me out by name as one of her tormenters.

“I do remember the moment when the knife went into Travis’ throat,” she said. “And he was conscious. He was still trying to attack me. It was I who was trying to get away, not Travis, and I finally did. I never wanted it to be that way, Judge. The gunshot did not come last. It came first, and that was when Travis lunged at me, just as I testified to. And, just as the State’s own detective testified to years ago before he and Juan got together and decided to change their story for trial.”

As she said those words, Arias physically pointed at me and used my first name. She appeared to be losing her composure. In my long career, I’d been personally attacked in the courtroom before, and this was no different. But perhaps saying those things made her feel better.

As it turned out, her pointed gesture was just the start. As her statement continued, it seemed she remembered more about the attack than she had ever let on. For years she had said that she was in a fog about the details of the crime—only remembering certain fragments of images, her running around the bedroom, finding the gun, shooting Travis, and the knife dropping. Now, in an apparent moment of anger, she recalled another detail, an important one. Arias, seven years later, recalled that Travis was conscious when she slit his throat. This was typical of the selective memory she exhibited every one of those eighteen days she had spent on the stand.

Beyond the lifting of the “fog,” there was something else to her words in this final statement, something more telling. As she stood in front of the judge trying to win the chance to be released after serving twenty-five years, she made it my fault that she had been found guilty, claiming that I had changed the facts about the gunshot to make my case easier to prosecute. Of course, medical science, not I, had proved that the gunshot came after Travis had already been mortally wounded by the multiple stabbings.

But the fact that she was using some of her final words to the judge to attack me, rather than take responsibility, spoke volumes about Arias and her character. This was the vengeful woman who had killed Travis, the woman with whom I had sparred for days on the witness stand, the woman I’d convicted of first-degree murder.