...And Never Let HerGo

What’s the use? You’ve made your decision and I’d be less than honest if I didn’t tell you we’re still reeling from it.”
    He turned his face away from the jurors, rejecting
them.
And Tom began a rambling monologue in which he referred to himself in the third person. “The Tom Capano that used to exist was someone people trusted, sometimes with their lives . . . people liked me. A friend of mine who served in Vietnam once said that if Tom Capano is your friend, he’ll take a bullet for you. One of my cousins tells me I’m loyal as a dog.”
    Tom quoted the Beatles song “Yesterday,” which summed him up, he said; he was, indeed, “half the man I used to be.” A “hundred-watt lightbulb back, say, in 1995, and what am I today? Twenty-five-watt lightbulb? Maybe a seven-and-a-half-watt night-light.”
    Tom blamed his situation on the “duplicity of friends,” of people he had helped who had deserted him. His words were a paean of self-pity. “My proudest accomplishment by far are my four daughters. . . . The argument will be made that I’m somewhat of a monster because I allowed them to communicate with Harry Fusco [the convicted sex offender in jail with Tom]. I’m not allowed to talk about the evidence but I can tell you this. I’m proud of my girls. A lonely, deserted individual, and they were willing to give their time [to Harry]. . . . If you think I’m perverted, I can’t help that.”
    Then Tom wandered to the edge of the guidelines for allocution and fell off as he began to harangue the prosecutors. “My kids were harassed. They were lied to and—”
    “We’re done.” Judge Lee rose up from the bench, sick to death of Tom’s arrogance. “Please take Mr. Capano out of the courtroom.”
    “I take it back,” Tom cried out, and Lee allowed him to stay. Tom then continued to tell the jury and those gathered in the courtroom what a valuable person he was. He would not beg for his life, he said, but asked to be allowed to live for the sake of his mother and daughters. He did not admit that he had killed Anne Marie, and his remarks only reaffirmed that he was a human being whose main concern was himself—his image, his wants, his needs. Despite all the cogent arguments, all the rhetoric, from a half dozen excellent attorneys,it was Tom himself who left that negative picture in the minds of the jurors.
    In order to return with a recommendation that Tom Capano be sentenced to death, the jurors would have to agree by a majority vote that the
aggravating
factors of his crime and his capability for violence outweighed the
mitigating
factors of his past good works, his family’s need for him, and the possibility that he might be a useful person, even behind bars, in helping others. But whatever they decided, the onus would not be on them but on Judge Lee when it came to the final decision. They would only recommend a sentence for the convicted man.
    Colm Connolly reminded the jury that the state had already proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Anne Marie’s murder was committed as the result of substantial planning and premeditation. These were two powerful aggravating factors. Gerry’s testimony had shown that as early as February 1996 Tom had begun to plan not only a murder but also the disposal of the body of his victim.
    “We talked about the defendant’s behavior on June 28,” Connolly reminded the jury. “How calm he was. Think about the presence of mind to hit star six-nine from Anne Marie’s apartment to place her in that apartment. Think about the planning that had to go into hitting the eight-hundred number thirteen minutes later back at the defendant’s home to create a false alibi. And then, think again, the final category I spoke [about] how ludicrous the defendant’s story was—how it defies common sense. . . . There’s no rational explanation to account for all the mounds and pieces of evidence that we gave you except for the idea that the defendant planned and premeditated this crime.”
    Connolly remarked that Oteri’s “village idiot” theory didn’t make sense. “The issue he raised was that you’d never commit a murder in your own house. But you
would.
Because if you take somebody in a car, you run the risk that somebody else might be there. You take them out to the woods, you don’t know who’s going to be around. The
only
environment Tom Capano controlled absolutely on June 27, 1996, was the environment at 2302 Grant Avenue.”
    He reminded the