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Tuesday, May 21, 2013

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.

 


15 comments:

  1. Excellent article and thoughts, Camille! Totally agree with them!

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  2. I must say that this case really strikes a nerve in those of us who oppose the death penalty....Arias appears unrepentant and manipulative, she certainly killed Alexander with brutal force...but why should she get the death penalty when Loughner gets life? Because he was insane? I think a fairly good case could be made that she was insane when she committed the murders. It all seems so Hollywood, so TV-movie, so Wheel of Fortune in determining who gets death and who does not. Of course if you are a black male your odds of getting the death penalty increase, and if you're a white female they decrease. In this case that may hurt Arias, as the jury will want to appear to be "fair". But I suppose we can continue the circus through any appeals, and 10 or 15 years from now excitedly gather around our computers and watch them slip the lethal drugs into Arias (by then public executions will probably be available on Pay-for-View or Hulu) and all feel so vindicated in taking her life.

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    1. Except the last time Arizona executed a woman was 1930.....I will be gone before her

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  3. Great article and so spot on. Notice how many times Jodi most likely lied in her final words to the jury. I don't buy that she donated her hair, I don't believe she intends to give one penny to DV and her Mother did not visit her in jail after the verdict. She gave her Fox interview and then was put on suicide watch. HLN spoke to her Mom who told them she was not able to see Jodi that day. Son once again, nothing but lies.

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  4. She's had a long time in jail to think about being sorry, it's just not there. Just like she had a drive hundreds of miles long to consider all the pain she'd inflict on her family and on Travis' family if she killed him. But she didn't or ignored the thoughts. It's all about Jodi. She probably screamed as she stabbed him "Don't say negative things to me!" or "I don't want to hear about your life outside of me!" And now Willmot continues the pain for Travis' siblings by reiterating the BS. The arrogance is unnerving and the narcissism she displays is simply THE definition.

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  5. Thanks for all your comments, everyone. I'm in court right now. It's the 15 minute break after Juan Martinez finished his closing argument, asking jury to give Jodi Arias the death penalty. I will write more thoughts about today in a new post soon. I hope you will come back to check for that. Thanks.

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  6. Excellent commentary! Thank you

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  7. She is a serial liar, a sociopath, a narcissist, and completely without any remorse, empathy or impulse control when it comes to being venomous in trashing Travis and devastating his family over and over and over.

    The jury has been smart twice in their decisions. I hope they will be equally smart this third and final time and she will get the DP.
    Shut this amoral self-serving monster up!

    Stop her from giving any more interviews - it is heinous on top of her already heinous pre-meditated extremely cruel crime!

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  8. Chris West Palm BeachMay 22, 2013 at 10:20 AM

    Camille,
    As a crime writer you will have to admit,you can't make this stuff up.From her actions after the murder to the interrogations,TV interviews,the trial, her actions and attitude has thrown a spotlight on the mentally ill that walk among us. All I can think of is Travis,and how he was manipulated by her coy and cunning actions.The evil started to show towards the end,and he never realized how serious and dangerous it could become.Murderers usually don't come in such a pretty package.

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  9. Jodi Arias never ceases to amaze me. Her level of crazy is just beyond comprehension. She has the most experienced of medical health experts flummoxed with her behavior. I am convinced, she really truly does not believe what she did was that bad! I'm an ID channel addict and have read many true crime novels but this is THE most heinous murder I've come across of committed by a woman.

    Watching her interviews the other day gave me a little more insight as to what Travis must have gone through dealing with her. It made his words of frustration that much more understandable, they're the same words thousands of us would love to say to her, given that chance. She is devoid of a soul and a conscience, she will never, ever change. I keep waiting for her to "get it" but it's not going to happen.

    Her 19 minute "Jodi show" for the jury was something else. It was like a high school speech on why she should be elected Class President and all the good programs she'll introduce. I have to admit, I felt a tiny bit of maternal empathy for her at that moment, as she sophomorically showed off her amateur drawings. But it was quickly extinguished by my disgust of the Survivor T-shirts.

    She has not donated her hair to Locks of Love, that's a complete lie of hers that she knows she can't get called out on right now. The Jodi Is Innocent website was touting the Long Beach Women's Shelter as the organization the t-shirt money was going to, coincidentally the same shelter ALV is involved with. The LB Women's shelter has since put a message on their Facebook page, denying any involvement with Jodi Arias and having no knowledge of, or involvement in her t-shirt project. They also asked the Jodi Is Innocent site to remove their name from the page.

    During one of her interviews she bragged about the good things she's done in jail, when asked to be more specific about it she answered "I'd prefer to keep my donations anonymous". She said a cousin showed up and this cousin was the one who convinced her to change her mind about pleading for her life rather than death, when asked the name of the cousin she answered "I'd rather not say". She was asked a couple of other questions where her answers were so evasive, "I don't know, I really can't say...maybe, maybe not". And "I don't know the answer to that, it could be yes or it could be no". Why bother interviewing this soulless liar anymore?

    Thank you for your writings. I'm so grateful for all the talented and insightful bloggers right now, it's helped me to maintain my sanity!

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    1. You absolutely replied stating all the true facts in a mature adult way. I know how frustrating she makes us. I just want to shake her and tell her to wake up! You can tell by her bratty attitude that it was alright to murder and slaughter Travis. Only a evil and soulless person could carry out this crime.
      Carolyn

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  10. Her allocution was stunning to me. As Camille points out, there is something so disturbing about the completely unbalanced juxtaposition of what Arias says and how she says it with what she did. It's been this way throughout the trial. An absurd degree of disconnect. Her allocution sounded like a high school student running for class president. All the things she would do to make her fellow students' school experiences better. She might as well have added to the recycling, book clubs and hair donations, a pledge to have Pepsi come out of the water fountains.

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  11. If it makes you feel any better, I took a look at that page and the twitter responses are all mocking her! I guess the folks at that site can't delete stuff they don't like. And just for the record, she ain't innocent!! She said so herself! Such a bunch of losers who who would torment a murdered man's family! Who are these people>!

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  12. Anybody noticed that the Shakespeare play she had been planning to watch was 'Othello'? Did the theatre company offer several different plays of Shakespeare, or was this the only one?

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