Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars (39 page)

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Authors: Juan Martinez

BOOK: Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars

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After the rebuttal witnesses completed their testimony, the presentation of evidence for both sides came to an end.

Closing arguments began on May 2, 2013, and ended the next day at 3:35
P.M.
, at which time the jury retired to consider its verdict. The jury deliberated for two days, May 6 and May 7, before informing the court on May 8, at 11:23
A.M.
, that they had reached a verdict.

The court announced that the jury’s verdict would be read after the lunch hour at 1:30
P.M.

But there would be no lunch for me. I just didn’t have an appetite. There had been so many other times during the trial that I had gone back to court after the recess without having eaten so it almost felt normal to miss the noontime meal one more time.

I don’t ever speculate on a verdict—it seems to serve no purpose. But there is always apprehension associated with the return of a verdict, so it was a relief to finally be back at coun
sel table as the jury filed into the courtroom having reached its decision.

At 1:48
P.M.
the clerk of the court stood up with the verdict in hand. And, as the electric tension in the courtroom climbed to an even higher pitch, the clerk announced that the jury had found Jodi Ann Arias guilty of premeditated first-degree murder.

EPILOGUE

I
t was around 8:15 on the morning of April 13, 2015, and I was already in the victim room next to courtroom 5C, waiting for the sentencing hearing of Jodi Ann Arias to begin. This room had been hallowed ground during trial, where uninhibited discussions between Travis’ family and me had been the norm. Today no one else was around, and I sat at the round table in the company of approximately ten empty chairs crowded into the room. Over the course of the trial, these chairs seemed to routinely find their way into the gallery just on the other side of the inner door to the courtroom.

As I sat waiting for the proceeding to get under way, my attention was drawn to the framed “Victim Notification” poster hanging on the wall, defining the rights of victims in criminal prosecutions. It had always been there, but today I actually took note of it, concluding that it was probably the reason this room had gotten its name. With fifteen minutes to waste, my thoughts wandered back to the proceedings that had taken place over the past twenty-six months in the courtroom on the other side of the door. I wondered if Arias had already been brought up to the holding cells so that the sentencing proceeding would start on time.

Arizona law provides for the possibility of three phases in cases where the death penalty is a sentencing option. In the first phase, known as the guilt phase, the jury is asked to decide whether the prosecution has proven the crime of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt. If the jury finds
a defendant guilty, then the trial proceeds to the aggravation phase, where the state must prove the existence of at least one aggravating circumstance before a defendant is eligible for the death penalty. Only if the jury finds an aggravating circumstance will the trial proceed to the last and final phase, the penalty phase, when the jury is asked to decide unanimously whether the penalty will be death or life in prison.

Arias had been found guilty of first-degree murder on May 8, 2013. One week later, on May 15, the jury returned its verdict finding one aggravating circumstance, that the murder was especially cruel, meaning that they agreed that Travis had suffered extreme physical pain or mental distress or anguish before he lapsed into unconsciousness and died. Although a majority of the jurors decided that death would be the appropriate sentence, they could not reach a unanimous verdict as required by law, and the court declared a mistrial on May 23, 2013.

A second jury was empaneled approximately one and a half years later to decide the sentence. The court allowed the delay to give the defense more time to conduct further investigation into Arias’ claims. The retrial of the penalty phase started with opening statements on October 21, 2014, and lasted thirty-eight trial days over the course of approximately four months. The defense had a lengthy presentation in support of their belief that Arias should be sentenced to life in prison as opposed to receiving the death penalty. Although a majority of those jurors, this time eleven out of twelve, voted to impose the death penalty, they were not unanimous, and the judge declared a second mistrial on March 5, 2015. The law does not permit any further retrials under these circumstances, meaning that the judge would now determine Arias’ sentence, either life in prison with the possibility of release after twenty-five years or natural life in prison with no possibility of release.

As I rose to enter the courtroom to hear the sentence, it occurred to me once again that had I chosen to pass off the
8:30
A.M.
call to the prosecutor whose shift had just begun that June morning, these last years would have been different. Like so much about this case, that one small decision had profound ramifications.

Looking back, I’ve come to see that the attitude I brought to this prosecution had nothing to do with Jodi Ann Arias and the bestial way she ended Travis’ life. To the contrary, my approach was a product of a time passed and the values and teachings of the small town where I grew up, a place that I still remember leaving.

It was September 1974 when I traveled south on Interstate 15 away from my home in Victorville, California, a small town in San Bernardino County about eighty-five miles northeast of Los Angeles. I was driving a 1964 Chevrolet Impala, a car that I’d bought for $250. It didn’t matter that it was ten years old and not in the best mechanical shape. I wasn’t going very far, only about ninety miles. I was on my way to begin college at the University of California, Irvine.

As I glanced in the rearview mirror, I was treated to the verdant landscape characteristic of my hometown. Trees lined the streets, including Seventh Street, the main road that ran from one end to the other. It was a very small town back then, with a population of only around twelve thousand; at least, that’s what the sign said. My rearview mirror also showed off the green fields alongside the Mojave River, which flowed through the outskirts of town. That’s how I remember seeing Victorville through nineteen-year-old eyes as I drove away that afternoon. I say that I remember seeing it that way because that’s how it seemed to me as I left it behind. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Victorville sits in the high desert in Southern California. There are few trees and no green fields, and the river mostly runs underground away from the sea. The climate is arid, and the wind blows almost every day, rolling tumbleweeds into yards in bunches. It is hot during the summer, with high tempera
tures above the hundred-degree mark, but cold in the winter, when the temperature drops into the teens. There are very few days that may be deemed pleasant. But it was my hometown and a place where I made memories, some good and some bad.

I attended the only high school in town, Victor Valley High. The student enrollment was low, so I knew almost everybody. It made belonging easy. We formed friendships, some stronger than others. Although time eroded those friendships, the same cannot be said of the values I learned. There were lessons taught in the home as I was growing up. In my family, my father’s edict was the last and only word. As I’ve gotten older, I have grown to understand the logic of his reasoning and have come to respect his decisions.

Perhaps Victorville was not as bucolic as I remember it, but it was the place where I learned right from wrong. And what Jodi Ann Arias did to Travis Alexander on June 4, 2008, was wrong.

For that, Judge Sherry Stephens of the Maricopa County Superior Court sentenced her to prison for the rest of her natural life.

It didn’t surprise me that Jodi Arias remained stone-faced during the reading of her sentence, wearing the same blank expression she had worn throughout much of the trial. Nor did it surprise me that she used her allocution prior to being sentenced, not to ask for forgiveness or to show remorse, but as a platform to point the finger at me, Detective Flores, and everybody else she deemed guilty of causing the injustice that she felt was now being foisted upon her.

To the end, Arias maintained her posture as a victim. It was her parents’ fault because her mother hit her with a spoon and her dad slapped her, and Bobby and Matt’s fault for cheating on her. It was Travis’ fault that she detoured to Mesa that day, and my fault for scrambling her brain with my questions. According to her, Detective Flores and I had even tampered with the evidence.

Trials are life-changing experiences, not only for a defendant who is convicted and must pay for his or her crime, but also for people like me who see the underside of life on a daily basis and are always in the maelstrom. This includes those who have assisted in bringing these cases to their completion—people like Detective Esteban Flores, who saw his duties through even though he suffered the loss of his fifteen-year-old son, Tony, during the course of the second penalty phase of the trial.

With a crime as highly-publicized as this one it is challenging to avoid the media coverage and it is sometimes important to turn your back on it all. This is especially true for me after having been scrutinized publicly in a way I’ve never been before and often in a negative fashion. In spite of the notoriety and criticism, nothing much has changed in my day-to-day work as a prosecutor with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. I am very much the same person I was when I answered that 8:30
A.M.
phone call, and I remain committed to my role as a prosecutor in the criminal justice system.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JUAN MARTINEZ
began working for the Maricopa County Attorney’s office in 1988. In his twenty-seven-year career with the office, he has spent nineteen years prosecuting homicide cases. Some of his most noteworthy cases include
Arizona v. Wendi Andriano,
who was convicted of first-degree murder and was the first woman sentenced to death by a jury in Arizona;
Arizona v. Scott Falater,
which was noted for the use of sleepwalking as a defense to the murder of his wife;
Arizona v. Loren Wade,
in which an Arizona State University football player was convicted of the shooting murder of an ex-ASU football player; and
Arizona v. Rick Wayne Valentini,
which resulted in a conviction for murder even though the victim’s body was never found.

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CREDITS

Front cover photographs: Arizona Department of Corrections via AP (top left); AP Photo
/The Arizona Republic,
Tom Tingle (top right);
The Arizona Republic,
3/29/13 © 2013 Gannett. All rights reserved.

COPYRIGHT

Photos on pages 1–11 of the photo insert courtesy of the Mesa Police Department.

Photos on pages 12, 13, and 14 (
bottom
) courtesy of the Siskiyou County Sherriff’s office.

Photo on pages 15 (
top left
) courtesy of Diane Melendez.

Photos on page 15 (
top right
) courtesy of the Mendes Family.

Photos on page 15 (
bottom
) courtesy of Angela Flores.

CONVICTION: THE UNTOLD STORY OF PUTTING JODI ARIAS BEHIND BARS.
Copyright © 2016 by Juan Martinez. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-244428-8

EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN 9780062444301

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