Sentencing Arguments Begin in '93 Slaying

The man who stabbed a woman 82 times in her bathtub with her infant daughter nearby is so violent and depraved that the only possible punishment is execution, federal prosecutors said yesterday as they began the penalty phase of the trial of Thomas M. Hager.

Hager, who was convicted last week of killing Barbara E. White and found eligible for the death penalty Monday, is a career criminal who never expressed remorse, prosecutors said. He has been convicted in two other killings, has masterminded a third and has attacked other inmates, they said.

"Violence is the only thing he knows. He used violence on the streets, and he uses that same violence in prison," Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven D. Mellin told jurors in his opening remarks in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. "It's time now to end the rampage that started with the killing in 1993 of a young, defenseless mother."

Defense attorneys portrayed Hager, 34, as the victim of a traumatic childhood in a poverty-stricken area of Southeast Washington, where he was beaten by his father and his parents abused drugs and alcohol. Although that doesn't excuse White's killing, they said, it did help shape the poor choices he made as an adult.

"It was a toxic environment that caused permanent, lasting damage," defense attorney Joseph McCarthy said. "He will die in prison. We cannot control the hour or the day. I think the evidence will show that that decision is better left to God."

Prosecutors are seeking capital punishment at a time when the death penalty is under intense scrutiny nationwide. The U.S. Supreme Court has granted several stays of execution as it prepares to review whether lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, a move that legal experts have said might signal a nationwide halt to the procedure until the issue is decided next year.

Although those stays were granted in state cases, lethal injection is the only method used to execute federal death row inmates. A lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court in Washington is challenging lethal injection at the federal level.

In 16 of the 19 federal capital trials begun in the past year, juries have chosen life in prison over the death penalty. Federal juries in Northern Virginia have never voted for death.

"Even in the most serious cases, juries are routinely rejecting the death penalty as simply not necessary in light of the alternative punishment of life in prison without release," said Kevin McNally, director of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel, which coordinates the defense of death row inmates.

White, 19, was gagged, beaten and stabbed while her 13-month-old daughter, Alexis, was taken to the next room of their Fairfax County apartment. The baby was left alone for the next 18 hours and tracked bloody footprints around the home. Alexis is now a high school freshman.

Federal prosecutors became interested in the case after it was investigated for years by two Fairfax cold case homicide detectives. Two other men, Lonnie T. Barnett Jr. and Arlington Johnson Jr., have pleaded guilty to similar federal charges in White's death, were sentenced to life in prison and testified against Hager.

The jury convicted Hager of one count of murder while engaging in drug trafficking. Jurors then found him eligible for the death penalty. The final phase of the trial will determine whether he will be sentenced to death or life in prison.

Prosecutors said that the only choice is execution and that Hager poses a continual threat to prison guards and inmates. "Make no mistake. Housing him in jail for the rest of his life is not the worst punishment he can get, and it is not worse than death," Mellin told jurors. "There truly is no other option, no other way to stop him."

Defense attorneys did not directly ask jurors to spare Hager, choosing instead to make their point by focusing on his childhood trauma as a "mitigating factor" that might explain his actions. McCarthy said Hager grew up in a filthy house where his parents fought every night and a neighborhood where gunshots were common.

"It was like a war zone," he said.