Jodi Arias and her legal team have one last chance to convince the jury on Wednesday afternoon that she doesn’t deserve the death penalty.
The trial for Arias’ murder of her boyfriend, Travis Alexander, is expected to resume today with closing statements from her attorneys after prosecutors shared gruesome crime scene photos on Tuesday. While the defense has argued during the trial that Arias suffers from psychological problems and has displayed regret over killing Alexander, prosecutors say that shouldn’t keep her from the death sentence.
“It doesn’t provide an excuse,” said prosecutor Juan Martinez.
Arias reportedly gave up the chance to make her own final pleas for a life sentence on Monday because she wasn’t allowed to do so one-on-one with the jury rather than in a full courtroom. This trial is her second, scheduled after she was convicted of murder because the first jury couldn’t make a decision about whether or not she deserved the death penalty.
Jodi admitted to killing Alexander in 2008–after first giving police a story about masked intruders who killed him and knocked her unconscious–and said she’d done it in self defense after he attacked her following a day of “rough sex”. Investigators found a camera inside a washing machine in the home where Alexander was found that still had photos from his last moments alive, and some of his body crumpled on the floor of a shower. His body was found with a gunshot wound to the head, several stab wounds, and a slit throat.
Arias and her attorneys have maintained that she was a faithful and loving girlfriend who often wrote poetry about Alexander, while he was in other relationships and stayed in contact with those women.
“We are learning that Travis Alexander was a bit of a player. He liked to sext many women at the same time he was still seeing Jodi Arias,” said courtroom blogger Jen Wood in January.