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'I wanted him to endure pain': Ex-juror struggled over Donald Smith verdict

Klasel said she has been haunted by the case. A former crime TV show fan, she has switched to what she calls "happy movies." Once a regular Walmart shopper, she can no longer bear to go to the store where Perrywinkle was kidnapped.

The mood was pretty raw when jurors went to decide Donald Smith’s fate.

“The emotions were just thick in the room,” says Keith Hawes. As the jury foreman, he decided to let everyone have few minutes to say what they were feeling.

“We need to vent here pretty quick,” Hawes remembers thinking, “because a lot of us were just ready to explode.”

The tension came after three grueling weeks of jury selection and graphic testimony in the capital murder case. In mid-February, Smith was convicted of the 2013 kidnapping, rape and murder of 8-year-old Cherish Perrywinkle. A week later, the same jury had to decide whether to give him life or death.

The verdict form moved them from one step to the next fairly seamlessly, Hawes said. But it was still a momentous decision. After their unanimous vote, Hawes said, one juror was on the verge of dissolving in tears.

“I said ‘you all right?’ She said 'no.' She said, ‘I don’t know what I’ve done,’” Hawes said he tried to reassure her.

“I said you didn’t do anything. Twelve of us did," he said.

Janie Klasel, one of eight women on the jury, agrees, “it was just awful having to sentence someone to death.”

Klasel said she has been haunted by the case. A former crime TV show fan, she has switched to what she calls “happy movies.” Once a regular Walmart shopper, she can no longer bear to go to the store where Perrywinkle was kidnapped.

“It’s just eerie for me,” she said

The toughest part of the trial was the second day, Klasel said, when jurors were forced to see the crime scene and autopsy photos of the 8-year-old.

Like several other jurors during the trial, Klasel could at times be seen staring or even glaring at Donald Smith. She said it was gut-wrenching to be in the same room with Smith, whom she said showed little emotion and zero remorse.

“I was angry and I was mad," she said. "It’s like when I would stare at him he would just smirk -- no remorse. And he could sit there and know he did this crime? It was gut-wrenching.”

She was one of three jurors who initially wanted to give Smith a life sentence – but not because she thought he deserved mercy.

“At first I thought the death penalty would be an easy way out -- just be injected and fall asleep," she said. "I wanted him to be beaten up out there in general population in the prison.”

Smith’s defense team seemed prepared to play on that feeling. As part of their strategy in seeking a life sentence, his lawyers tried to introduce testimony from former prison warden James Aiken about the risks Smith would face in prison, including being raped or killed.

Judge Mallory Cooper did not allow that testimony to be introduced, but it’s clear some jurors were thinking along those same lines.

“I wanted him to endure the same pain from other inmates as to what happened to that little girl,” Klasel said.

In later conversation, she said she came to believe that the only appropriate and legal verdict was death. Hawes conceded the mood in deliberations was occasionally vengeful.

“There were statements about what some people would like to do to him," he said.

But he said they kept the focus on the choice at hand – and what the law allowed.

Asked if he has any feelings today about Smith, he answers quickly: “None whatsoever.”

He can’t say the same about Cherish. During the trial, he said he held it together emotionally right up until the end when Prosecutor Mark Caliel held up the girl’s photo.

“I’d seen her picture, but it just puts her right there with her,” he said. “That was the hardest part.”

When asked about how he manages when he thinks of the girl today, he paused.

“Just don’t show me her picture," he said. "That wouldn’t be good."

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