A jury in Georgia elect­ed to sen­tence James Sullivan to life with­out parole after find­ing him guilty of hir­ing a hit­man to kill his wife in 1987. ​“We thought that life impris­on­ment with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole was enough. We did­n’t want to be the judge about some­body else’s life. We want­ed God to be the judge,” said juror Debra Klayman after the sen­tence was hand­ed down. The jury had the option of the death penal­ty, life with­out parole, or life with parole. Klayman said that the jury decid­ed at the start of its five hour delib­er­a­tion that Sullivan would not get death.

Sullivan is a mil­lon­aire and a for­mer fugi­tive on the FBI’s most-want­ed list who was cap­tured in Thailand in 2002, four years after he was indict­ed on mur­der charges and 15 years after he payed a truck dri­ver $25,000 to kill his wife. The mur­der took place on the same day that Sullivan and his wife were to attend a hear­ing to dis­cuss prop­er­ty dis­tri­b­u­tion in their divorce. (Associated Press, March 14, 2006). 

See Life Without Parole and Arbitrariness.

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