By Brad Poole
(Reuters) - An Arizona jury on Wednesday declared Jodi Arias eligible to receive the death penalty for the fatal shooting and stabbing of her ex-boyfriend in 2008, saying that she had acted with extreme cruelty.
The jury was due to return to court on Thursday to weigh additional evidence in deciding whether to actually sentence Arias to death or to life in prison for killing Travis Alexander, 30.
The same jury rejected Arias' claims of self-defense to convict her last week of the first-degree murder of Alexander, whose body was found slumped in the shower of his Phoenix-area home five years ago. He had been stabbed 27 time, had his throat slashed and been shot in the face.
The penalty phase of the proceedings moved swiftly on its first day on Wednesday. After prosecution and defense presentations, the jury deliberated for about three hours before deciding Arias was eligible for the death penalty and then recessed for the day.
Arias appeared agitated and tearful at times during the proceedings, wiping her eyes and nose with a tissue and mostly keeping her gaze downward. But she kept her composure during the reading of the jury's verdict finding that she had committed the murder in an "especially cruel" manner.
She had been placed on suicide watch in a psychiatric ward following her conviction a week ago after saying in a television interview that she would prefer the death penalty to life in prison, but she was returned to her jail cell on Monday.
The petite, 32-year-old former waitress from California had sought unsuccessfully to convince the jury during her trial that she acted in self-defense.
She admitted shooting Alexander, with whom she was having an on-again, off-again affair, but said she opened fire on him with his own pistol after he attacked her in a rage because she dropped his camera while taking snapshots of him in the shower. She said she did not remember stabbing him.
The lurid circumstances of the case, which went to trial in January and featured graphic testimony, photographs of the blood-sprayed crime scene and a sex tape, became a sensation on cable television news and unfolded in live Internet telecasts of the proceedings.
On Wednesday, prosecutors focused on the grisly details of Alexander's slaying in their bid to cast the crime as especially cruel - a legal standard for aggravating factors that would qualify Arias for the death sentence.
FIERCE ATTACK
Prosecutor Juan Martinez recounted how Arias attacked Alexander in his own shower, repeatedly stabbing him for two minutes as he tried to escape from the bathroom. She then followed the bleeding victim down a hallway and slashed his throat when he was too weak to get away.
Alexander knew he was going to die and was unable to resist his attacker at that point, Martinez said.
"Each and every time that blade went into his body, it hurt," Martinez told the jury. "It was only death that relieved that pain. It was only death that relieved that anguish, and that is especially cruel."
The defense argued that adrenaline would have prevented Alexander from feeling the pain of the knife blows, thus reducing his suffering. If the bullet wound to his forehead came first, rendering him unconscious in seconds, then Alexander would not have suffered, defense attorney Kirk Nurmi said.
During the trial, Martinez cast Arias as manipulative and prone to jealousy in previous relationships. He said she had meticulously planned to kill Alexander, a businessman and motivational speaker.
In making his case for premeditated murder, Martinez had accused Arias of bringing the pistol used in the killing, which has not been recovered, with her from California home to the scene of the crime. He said she also rented a car, removed its license plate and bought gasoline cans and fuel to conceal her journey to the Phoenix suburbs to kill Alexander.
Martinez said Arias also lied after the killing to deflect any suspicion that she had been involved in his death, leaving a voicemail on Alexander's cellphone, sending flowers to his grandmother and telling detectives she was not at the crime scene before changing her story.
Nurmi, meanwhile, argued that Arias had snapped in the "sudden heat of passion" in the moments between a photograph she took showing Alexander alive and taking a shower, and a subsequent picture of his apparently dead body covered in blood.
(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Tim Dobbyn and Bill Trott)
