Jodi Arias Allocution Statement-Thoughts from the Courthouse

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As I write this I am hurriedly grabbing lunch and charging up my computer in the courthouse where Jodi Arias just finished telling a poker-faced group of jurors why they should spare her life. Later today those jurors will deliberate that question.

I'm thinking about her speech a lot. She showed the jurors slides of the sketches she does while behind bars. These included portraits of movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor and of Jodi's little niece at the piano. These were color sketches done with pencil. Jodi told the jury that because she will spend the rest of her life in prison-one way or the other-she would never be able to make an oil painting again. She managed to convey her sense of loss over losing this resource for her art.

She told them of her plans to institute a recycling program at the prison to which they will send her, if she gets a life sentence. She let us know just how wasteful the institution was and how she would be the great manager they needed to reduce their wastefulness if her life were spared.

She produced a representation of the Locks of Love program and told how she had so far made three donations of her own hair to the charitable organization for providing wigs to medical patients, three times she has cut her long hair and sent it to Locks of Love since her arrest some 5 years ago.

She told them how her life had been enriched by books and how, if given life, she would reduce illiteracy in prison and start book clubs for the inmates. And she would teach sign language, too. She hasn't done these things during her stay in Maricopa County Jail, she said, because she was too busy preparing for trial.  But given a life sentence, not shut up in Death Row, she would be a source of education and inspiration in the General Population of fellow women inmates.

In the midst of all this helpfulness, Jodi help up a T shirt with the word "Survivor" blazoned across it. She said she designed it and was selling it to help "survivors of domestic violence."

She said a lot of things, but let's start with that last one. Jodi Arias, trying to persuade twelve strangers to be merciful to her, told them she realized "some people don't believe I am a survivor of domestic violence."  As if this were somehow gentle and subtle, not a direct slap to the judgment of the people she was addressing, the jurors.

Jodi gave a convoluted excuse for having gone before television cameras soon after her arrest and admitted she lied on TV. Somewhere in that line of reasoning she built herself a platform for taking more swipes at Travis himself, the man she left to rot unmourned and unaccounted for locked behind his own bedroom doors for days.  The reason for her lies and strange TV appearances was that she was really "protecting" Travis's reputation. She "admired" Travis, she told the jurors, so that explained her not wanting people to know how really lousy he actually was, according to her reasoning.  What a skillful balancing act, riding both sides of that coin at the same time. Skillful at least in that she managed to convince herself it sounded good.

I have a sense of gloom for any Locks of Love recipients who now may be wondering if they have been given the hair of an unrepentant and gruesome murderer to cover their bald heads, the same hair that Jodi left mixed with Travis's blood in the shower where he died.  Perhaps Jodi would have made a more generous gesture if she had left her donations as a matter of privacy. 

I can just imagine the jury deliberations later today as 12 people willing to convict her of 1st degree pre-meditated murder throw their hands to their hearts and foreheads, what will the Arizona State Prison System do without Jodi's organizing skills for a recycling program? There couldn't possibly be any security issues involved with that the wardens might have already considered? What a blessing Jodi will be if we send her out there to help out administration and teach all the 'lesser' inmates about literature and sign language!

Taking a human life, in the form of a death sentence, is a very serious thing. I don't often digress into sarcasm like that during these proceedings, but the more I replay her speech in my mind, even watching some of her jurors cross toward the elevators while I type (they cannot see my screen and do not notice me),  the more I realize how much she revealed herself.

As others have already noted, at no time did Jodi say she was sorry for what she had done to Travis. She said it was "the worst thing she had ever done." Even while she was saying so, some 30 feet in front of me, I in the back row, she across the railing and facing the jury, I couldn't help but think, "It's the worst thing ANYONE in this room has done!"

Jodi spoke those words during a river of rhetoric that almost made it comparable to someone else saying they shoplifted a lipstick as a teen or were snarky to their spouse.

It's almost time to go back upstairs. The one thing I cannot stop thinking about Jodi saying, most of all, is when she revealed she never understood just how much Travis's brothers and sisters were suffering until two of them made victim impact statements last week. Suddenly, Jodi said, she had it "hit home."

For me, the magnitude of that revelation cannot be over-emphasized.  Saying that you could stab someone's head so hard the skull chipped and divoted, slicing their throat all the way through the trachea, stabbing them in the heart, shooting them in the head and delivering so many other wounds and insults -- it took you till the end of the trial to figure out this would devastate and derail a family forever?

Jodi, that doesn't make you a person who deserves mercy. That makes you a very scary person. A very scary person indeed.