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.