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11.26.03

Sniper jury copes with terror

Horrific images took toll on jury

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. -- On many nights in the murder trial of John Allen Muhammad, juror Elizabeth S. Young would not go directly home to her husband and three children. Instead, she would take long walks on the beach or sit in coffee shops and think about the difficult decision before her.

The heart-rending testimony from the families of the sniper victims and the gruesome crime scene photos began sinking in as the trial rolled on. Even though Young had been in the Navy, she had never seen what a high-powered rifle could do to a person's face - one of many horrific images that left their mark on her memory.

Those images and her time sitting on a jury deliberating whether Muhammad should live or die made her see the world in a different way.

"It just made life more precious," Young, 45, said in an interview yesterday. "I would eat dinner or watch a video, and I would just be staring off. I also felt unsafe. I'd be pumping gas and think somebody could gun me down right here. I felt that vulnerability."

When the jury began deliberations Friday morning and an anonymous vote was taken on index cards, Young was among the five jurors who voted to sentence Muhammad to life in prison without parole. The other seven jurors voted for death, she said. That morning, Young was one of the most outspoken proponents against a death sentence.

"I wanted to break the cycle of violence," said Young, who added that she may become an anti-death penalty activist. "We had just seen six weeks of the most horrible grief and bloodshed and killing, and just because it's a state-sanctioned killing doesn't make it any better."

But what brought Young and the other jurors around to the death sentence they arrived at Monday was the fear that even if Muhammad was locked up for the rest of his life, he might find a way to get out and kill again. That fear was rooted, they said, in the look on Muhammad's face when his former wife took the stand last week.

Mildred Muhammad testified that her husband had repeatedly threatened to kill her. After she was awarded full custody of the couple's three children in September 2001, she took them to Clinton, in Prince George's County, to protect herself and start a new life. During her two hours of testimony, John Muhammad looked as he never had before in the trial, jurors said.

"When his wife was on the stand, it looked like pure hatred on his face," said jury foreman Jerry M. Haggerty, 55, a retired Navy captain. "I have no doubt in my mind that if given the chance, he would try to do harm to her. I also believe that anybody who stood in the way, if given the chance, he would not hesitate to do harm to them."

Young described the look on Muhammad's face as one of "overpowering hatred." It was, she said, the only time she felt afraid of him. But she added that she also felt uneasy when the jury was taken to view the Chevrolet Caprice in which Muhammad was arrested, and the jurors walked around the car as he stood a few feet away.

"I felt horribly uncomfortable," Young said. "I hadn't seen him standing up, up close, before. I realized, gosh, this is a pretty big and powerful person."

A former Navy intelligence officer who describes herself as highly analytical, Young said her conversion to favoring a death sentence came over the weekend, when she realized that she couldn't let her personal, moral disagreement with the death penalty get in the way of following the law. Yet she also felt the law provided little guidance.

"I was stunned to get the final instructions and find it really came down to an individual, moral decision," she said. "So how in the world can we make a unanimous decision on something that splits the country down the middle? I didn't think we'd be able to do it."

Still, she felt that "if ever there's a case deserving the death penalty, this is it." She read all the ballistics and autopsy reports - a grim, difficult task - and was moved by the reports on those shot in the head. She said she believed those reports showed Muhammad used more force than needed to kill, one of the aggravating factors required for the death sentence.

When the jury reconvened at 9 a.m. Monday, Young changed her vote to death. So did Dennis Bowman, a 52-year-old hardware store employee who was worried that Muhammad was so crafty he would find a way to kill someone in prison. The vote then was 9-3 in favor of death.

Haggerty, the foreman, told the jurors to be ready to make a case for their position. After an hour of discussion, the jury room grew quiet, and Haggerty called for another vote. This time it was 12-0 for death.

"Most of us, when we came in Monday, were fairly certain it would take a while to come to agreement," Haggerty said. "It would not have surprised me if it had gone past Thanksgiving."

Observers had said that if anything was going to tilt the jury toward a life sentence, it was the thought of depriving Muhammad's children - ages 10 to 13 - of the father they still loved, according to their letters that were read in court.

But Young said the letters, with their upbeat descriptions of the children's apparently normal lives, backfired for the defense.

"It was so obvious that the children were happy," Young said. "They were thriving and flourishing in school. They were on sports teams and in school plays and on safety patrol. They had a wonderful life, and perhaps they were better off not to have contact with him."

Haggerty, echoing prosecutors, said the father whom the children loved was not the man who was accused of killing 10 people and wounding three in the Washington area last fall. The children loved a memory of their father, not who he is now, Haggerty said.

"There's no way to say they would have loved the man he's turned into over the two years since they last saw him," Haggerty said. "I thought the kids would be better off living with the memory."

Like the other jurors, Haggerty said the trial took its toll on him.

It was especially hard, he said, before the jurors began deliberations, when they had to absorb the painful and wrenching testimony without being able to talk to anyone about it, not even their fellow jurors.

"There was no release. It stays bottled up inside you," Haggerty said. "You would just go over it and over it in your head, and when you do that for six weeks, you just can't shut it off at 9 or 10 o'clock at night."

Young said her husband would cut all the trial articles out of the paper before she came into the kitchen in the morning, saving them in a box to be read later. Many days, much of her paper was missing. She didn't watch television news because she never knew when a sniper story might be shown.

Yesterday, Young said she may have influenced other jurors who were holding out for a life sentence. She feared a mistrial if the jury was deadlocked so she made the case for death even as her feelings on the issue were coalescing into opposition.

"I have some moral qualms with the death penalty," she said. "But this was not the time to change the law."

Sun staff researcher Sarah Gehring contributed to this article.

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