Rodriguez jurors taking time with penalty phase

FARGO, N.D. - Jurors in the Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. trial wrestled with definitions Wednesday, twice sending questions to the judge as they weighed whether the man they convicted last week of kidnapping and killing Dru Sjodin qualifies for the death penalty.

The federal jury of seven women and five men deliberated for about four hours Wednesday. They'll resume work this morning.

If they find that prosecutors have proved at least one threshold factor and at least one aggravating factor -- the government has alleged four in each category -- the trial goes to a third and final phase in which the same jury could order Rodriguez's execution. The only alternative is life in prison without parole.

If jurors find that none of the requirements set out in the federal death penalty act are met, the trial ends and Rodriguez receives the life sentence.

The jury's first question involved intent -- whether the intent to kill Sjodin had to exist at the outset of her abduction. Erickson said the law's requirement would be met if intent was established during the course of the kidnapping.

Later, jurors trooped back into the courtroom to hear Erickson define "protracted loss," as the term was applied to serious bodily injury suffered by assault victims.

Before jurors received the case Wednesday, U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley told them Rodriguez "had a propensity for sexual assault long before" he attacked Sjodin. But with Sjodin, the violence escalated, Wrigley said.

When Rodriguez stocked his car with rope, a knife and other materials and picked Sjodin out at the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, N.D., on Nov. 22, 2003, it was with the intent "that there would be no witness this time," Wrigley said.

"There was murderous intent. Dru Sjodin would not breathe a word of this to anyone. Not one single breath."

Wrigley said prosecutors also had proved that Rodriguez killed Sjodin in the course of kidnapping her, that he had committed two or more prior felony assaults resulting in serious bodily injury, and that the killing of Sjodin was done in an "especially heinous, cruel and depraved manner" after planning and premeditation.

"Pause and think about what Dru endured," he asked of jurors. She was punched, bloodied, bound and gagged, stripped, hauled around the countryside for hours until her life was "snuffed out with two vicious knife cuts to her neck," he said. "She was raped, beaten, terrorized." And Rodriguez "was utterly indifferent to her pleas," he said.

A tough assignment

Defense attorney Richard Ney, a death-penalty expert from Kansas assigned by the court to assist in Rodriguez's defense, told jurors, "I have to ask you a hard thing today: Put aside the horrible crime, the emotions it has brought up."

The death-penalty law and its definitions are rigid, he said, "and that is its beauty and its majesty." If it were not rigid, the law could be bent easily and be applied unequally.

Whatever premeditation the government had shown went to the kidnapping, not the killing, he said, and "if you're going to kill someone, you don't put a bag over their head so they can't identify you."

The attacks on two prior victims didn't cause either "protracted impairment of mental faculty," an element of the "protracted loss" defined by the death-penalty law, he said. Both past victims went on to pursue a career, have relationships and show "significant ability ... to deal with life."

As to whether the killing was "heinous, cruel or depraved," Ney told jurors that "nowhere do we say that murder is not horrible, but we're talking about something different here -- a matter of legal definition, above and beyond the killing itself."

If the knife wounds to Sjodin's neck were fatal, "those cannot be considered by you as part of the torture or serious physical abuse" alleged in the indictment, Ney said.

What's left, he said, are some bruises to Sjodin's face and arm, a non-fatal stab wound to her side and some chafing where her wrists were bound.

"Is that sufficient to be torture?" the attorney asked. "I suggest to you it isn't. This was not a protracted act."

As two families listened -- Rodriguez's mother and two sisters, Sjodin's parents and other relatives -- Ney said that "what happened to Dru Sjodin should never have happened," but jurors should decide his punishment "not on emotion or passion, but on the evidence and the law."

Chuck Haga • 612-673-4514 • crhaga@startribune.com