Jury votes death for Vermont killer

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Unswayed by his expressions of remorse, a federal jury in Vermont sentenced 25-year-old Donald Fell to death yesterday for kidnapping and killing a supermarket clerk, Tressa King, five years ago. It was the first time in nearly 50 years that someone has been sentenced to die in Vermont.

''We'll be there in the front row," Lori Hibbard, one of King's daughters, said of the execution.

The federal jury recommended the death penalty just before noon yesterday, the second day of deliberations on his sentence.

Fell -- originally from Wilkes-Barre, Pa. -- was convicted June 24 of kidnapping King, a 53-year-old grandmother from North Clarendon, Vt., as she arrived for work at a Rutland supermarket, taking her to New York state, and bludgeoning her to death as she prayed for her life in the early hours of Nov. 27, 2000.

Hours earlier, Fell, with his childhood friend Robert J. Lee, who later hanged himself in jail, had killed his mother and her boyfriend in the Rutland apartment Fell shared with them.

Yesterday, Fell watched the jurors intently as they filed back into the packed courtroom, none of them meeting his gaze. He showed no emotion as the decision was read.

''He respects your decision," Fell's lawyer, Gene Primomo, said after the verdict, reading from a statement. ''He appreciates your hard work and wants to tell you and the family of his sincere remorse."

There was no visible reaction from King's family, who had pushed for the death penalty. But moments later, outside the courtroom, relatives said the family felt vindicated, after waiting almost five years.

''It's justice for my sister," said Barbara Tuttle, tears running down her cheeks. ''We didn't want it decided by a judge. We wanted it decided by average people who know right from wrong."

''I think it's what he deserved," said Charlotte Tuttle, another sister. ''It's simple."

Fell's case has stirred passionate debate on the streets and editorial pages of Vermont, one of 12 states that do not have the death penalty. Until May, when serial killer Michael Ross was put to death in Connecticut, New England had not executed anyone in 45 years.

The last execution in Vermont was in 1954, when two killers were electrocuted. No one has been sentenced to death in the state since 1957, a sentence that was later commuted, and no one has stood trial facing death since 1962. The death penalty was officially abolished in 1987.

Under a tentative plea agreement worked out by prosecutors in 2001, Fell was to plead guilty to a single charge, kidnapping resulting in death, in exchange for a life sentence without parole. But US Attorney General John D. Ashcroft rejected the deal, insisting that prosecutors proceed with a death penalty case. By law, a federal judge must follow the jury's recommendation and sentence Fell to death.

US District Judge William Sessions III did not immediately set a sentencing date. Alexander Bunin, chief counsel for the defense, said the sentence will be automatically appealed in federal court and then, if necessary, to the US Supreme Court. The execution would almost certainly happen out of state.

Outside the courthouse yesterday, a half-dozen protesters from the group Vermonters Against the Death Penalty held signs with slogans including ''End State Violence" and ''Death is God's Decision."

By abolishing the death penalty, the group's leaders said in a statement, ''Vermont joined with democratic nations around the world that have rejected government-sponsored killing as an appropriate response to crime."

The statement continued, ''We defend Vermont's right to remain an abolitionist state and decry the 1994 law that expanded the federal death penalty and made possible the return of capital punishment to Vermont against the democratic will of its citizens."

The federal Death Penalty Act, enacted in 1988 and expanded in 1994, allows federal prosecutors to seek death sentences in states that have no such penalty. In order to recommend that Fell be executed, jurors had to conclude unanimously that he planned King's death and killed her in an especially cruel and heinous manner. Prosecutors said she was stomped on and bludgeoned as she lay on the ground, praying and pleading for her life.

As part of Fell's effort to evade the death penalty, his sister described a nightmarish childhood with abusive, alcoholic parents. Her brother began drinking before he was a teenager and grew more violent with the years, she told jurors.

King's siblings testified that they also grew up poor, with an abusive, alcoholic father, yet she and her siblings chose to be good citizens.

Several jurors cried openly as King's family described their persistent sense of loss at the death of a woman, known as Terry, whom they described as timid and naive.

Several jurors reached by phone yesterday declined to comment on their decision.

In a statement, William F. Schultz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, called Fell's sentence ''another missed opportunity for the United States to act as a global leader in the fight to protect human rights."

But Hibbard, King's daughter, said she thought this verdict was just.

''My mother was a totally innocent person," she said, ''and he had every opportunity to let her go."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.