Prosecutors Urge Death Penalty in Sailor's Slaying

Prosecutors urged a jury on Thursday to impose the death penalty on an ex-Marine who murdered a Navy sailor, arguing it's the only adequate punishment for a man they say has committed a series of violent, sexually motivated attacks on women and young girls over the last nine years.

Jurors at the U.S. District Court in Alexandria heard closing arguments from prosecutors and began deliberations on the fate of Jorge Torrez, 25, of Zion, Ill.
 
The defense made no argument to the jury. 
 
Torrez has ordered his lawyers not to contest the government's case during the sentencing phase of the trial. On Thursday, Torrez sat impassively in front of the jury in his green jail jumpsuit, forgoing the civilian clothes he has worn all triial.
 
The jury has already found Torrez guilty of the murder of Petty Officer Amanda Snell, a Las Vegas native, in 2009 at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, in a barracks where both lived a few doors down from each other.
 
But prosecutor James Trump reminded the jury that the murder of Snell was far from his only crime. When Torrez was only 16, prosecutors say he stabbed and killed two girls, 8-year-old Laura Hobbs and 9-Year-old Krystal Tobias, in a park in his hometown of Zion.
 
Jurors saw gruesome photos of Hobbs' body with stab wounds to the eyes that medical experts concluded occurred while she was still alive. Semen found on Hobbs was linked by DNA evidence to Torrez.
 
 And in 2010, Torrez committed a series of stalking attacks on three women in northern Virginia, including one who was raped, choked and left for dead. It was Torrez's arrest in those cases that helped investigators tie him to Snell's murder and the slayings of the two Illinois girls.
 
He is already serving a life sentence for the Arlington attacks.
 
Until his arrest in Virginia, Trump told jurors, Torrez believed he had literally gotten away with murder.
 
But Torrez bragged about the killings to another inmate after his arrest in the Arlington attacks, and prosecutors played recordings of those confessions to the jury in which he laughed about the killings and showed no remorse.
 
Trump reminded jurors that Torrez bragged about being "an army of one'' while preying on defenseless children.
 
"There's no room for doubt. Jorge Torrez deserves to die,'' Trump said.
 
If Torrez is sentenced to death, he will be the first at the Alexandria courthouse since 2007 and would join 59 other prisoners on federal death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. 
Copyright AP - Associated Press
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