Jodi Arias: Prosecutors have pattern of misconduct

PHOENIX — The woman convicted of killing her secret lover has found a timely bedfellow in her mission to avoid the death penalty, citing recent developments in the case a woman convicted of killing her young son whose charges recently were dismissed because of "egregious prosecutorial misconduct."

The murders were nearly two decades apart, but the transgressions of the Maricopa County Attorney's Office persisted, Jodi Arias' defense lawyers claim.

On Nov. 10, Arias filed a pleading to dismiss charges, or to at least remove the death penalty from the table, alleging that prosecutors had destroyed evidence that would favor Arias.

Sunday's supplemental filing reiterated these accusations, reminding the judge of testimony that pointed to a state cover-up, and using Debra Milke's case to signify a pattern of prosecutorial abuses.

Milke, 49, spent 23 years on Arizona's death row for the murder of her 4-year-old son, Christopher, in 1989. But a federal appeals court threw out her conviction and death sentence were thrown out in March 2013 because of the original prosecutor's failure to disclose evidence that might have helped Milke's lawyers challenge the then-Phoenix detective who claimed she had confessed to him.

On Thursday, the Arizona Court of Appeals ordered a Maricopa County Superior Court judge to dismiss the charges withprejudice, meaning they cannot be brought again. County Attorney Bill Montgomery said he would take the decision up to the Arizona Supreme Court.

"The correlation between the misconduct in the Milke case and the misconduct that has infested (Arias') own case should be highly instructive to this court as the patterns of State conduct are eerily similar," the defense wrote in its Sunday motion.

The decision of whether to drop the death penalty for Arias is now in the hands of Judge Sherry Stephens.

Arias, 34, was found guilty of first-degree murder in May 2013.

Travis Alexander, 30, her sometime lover, was found dead in the shower of his Mesa, Ariz., home in June 2008. He had been shot in the head and stabbed nearly 30 times; his throat had been slit.

The jury was unable to come to a conclusion of whether to sentence Arias to life or death, compelling a new sentencing trial with a new jury.

During her first trial, prosecutors painted Arias as the sexual aggressor of the couple, a theme Arias' lawyers would refute consistently.

Alexander was the sexual deviant, they said.

Mesa police officers testified that Alexander's computer had no viruses or pornography, and prosecutor Juan Martinez called Arias a liar for saying there was.

But tens of thousands of files were deleted from the computer, according to a later revelation, a lapse that defense would blame squarely on police or prosecutors and prosecutors would blame on a previous defense team.

A three-day hearing that took place over three separate weeks ensued in Maricopa County Superior Court. It ended Thursday afternoon.

Arias' lawyers, Jennifer Willmott and Kirk Nurmi, and their forensic expert, Bryan Neumeister, led the court through a description of the porn sites that had been visited and the computer viruses that had infected Alexander's computer because of porn viewing.

Martinez claimed throughout the hearing that it was Arias' prior defense team that was to blame for the deletions and later accused Neumeister.