Friday, March 15, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
Convicted double murderer Michael Rippo told the jury deciding his fate that if he were on the panel "politically I'd sentence me to die."
He then said Thursday in an admitted "plea for mercy" at his penalty hearing that "religiously I don't believe in the death penalty."
But the jury didn't listen and sentenced the 30-year-old man -- who already spent half of his life behind bars -- to die by lethal injection for the strangulation slayings of two women whose bound bodies were stuffed into a closet.
The jury in District Judge Gerard Bongiovanni's courtroom deliberated more than four hours.
In his statement, Rippo told his victims' families that "I believe their deaths were every bit as senseless as you believe."
He talked of grief and shedding tears over the women's deaths but demonstrated none of it to the jury.
When the verdict was read, Rippo still showed no emotion although others in the audience wept.
During closing arguments, Deputy District Attorney Mel Harmon detailed the six "aggravating circumstances" he said were present in the case -- any one of which would legally justify a death sentence.
They included such things as committing the murders while on parole or during the course of a burglary or robbery.
Rippo was on parole for the 1982 beating and rape of a woman in her Las Vegas apartment when he committed the 1992 murders of Denise Lizzi, 25, and Lauri Jacobson, 27.
Their bodies were discovered two days later in Jacobson's home at the Katie Arms Apartments, 3850 Cambridge St.
Deputy District Attorney Dan Seaton focused his closing argument on the similarities between the double murder and the beating and rape a decade earlier for which Rippo served eight years in prison.
Defense attorney Philip Dunleavy spent most of his closing railing against the concept of the death penalty, noting that it need not be imposed no matter how many aggravating circumstances were present.
"If killing is wrong, why do we have to kill people (by execution) to show killing is wrong?" he asked. "Killing Rippo won't balance the scales."
He described the victims as "drug dealers and intravenous drug users" and suggested they participated in the events that took their lives.
Testimony at the trial indicated the murders were revenge killings over a purported drug rip-off.
But Harmon called it a "grisly double murder ... by torture" during a burglary and robbery that deserved the death penalty.
As options to the death penalty, the jury could have sentenced Rippo to life prison terms with or without the possibility of parole but chose the harshest penalty.
That jury had convicted Rippo last week of first-degree murder after a trial spanned more than a month.
Much of the penalty hearing focused on the details of the 1982 crime that began as a simple break-in by a 16-year-old boy, until Rippo discovered the then-24-year-old woman asleep in her bed.
Deputy District Attorney Dan Seaton said Rippo tied her up and tortured and beat her before raping her.
The woman, now 38-years-old, told the jury that she escaped death only by convincing Rippo to exchange her life for the keys to her car and a promise that she wouldn't report the crime.
In prison for that crime, Rippo was caught hiding a 9-inch knife and a set of homemade fighting sticks in his cell.
The key witness in the slayings of Lizzi and Jacobson was Rippo's girlfriend, Diana Hunt, who admitted breaking a beer bottle over Jacobson's head while Rippo shocked both women with a stun gun.
Hunt testified that she initially believed the intent was to rob the women but learned that Rippo intended revenge over a soured drug deal.
Seaton and Deputy District Attorney Mel Harmon also presented a series of jail house informants to testify that Rippo had confessed the murders to them.
Defense attorneys attacked Hunt's testimony and the police investigation of the slayings, but the jury determined the evidence was sufficient to convict Rippo of first-degree murder.
Hunt is serving a 15-year prison sentence for her role in the robbery.
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