FARGO, N.D. -“And on Nov. 22, 2003, she was gone,” Chris Lang wrote in a statement for prosecutors this spring, as they sought to document the impact of Dru Sjodin’s death.

“And now a part of me is gone forever as well,” Sjodin’s boyfriend wrote. “That happy carefree feeling about life, that innocence, is gone, replaced with a more calloused, bitter, angrier person.”

But as prosecutors push this week to convince a federal court jury that Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. should die for kidnapping and killing Sjodin, defense attorneys trying to save his life want to block Lang’s statement and the angry, sorrowful statements of several others.

The federal death penalty act, defense lawyers argue, limits such statements to members of the victim’s family, and even they must avoid emotional denunciations of the defendant and appeals for his death.

On Tuesday, the same U.S. District Court jury that convicted Rodriguez of kidnapping and killing Sjodin will begin to consider whether the crime meets requirements set out in the death penalty act.

One qualifying factor is premeditation, and the government will try to show that Rodriguez trolled the Columbia Mall area in Grand Forks looking for a young, pretty blond woman and that he had items in his car to carry out the abduction, including rope and a knife.

A history of similar crimes is another factor, and prosecutors will remind jurors of Rodriguez’s earlier convictions for kidnapping and sexual assault, attacks that began when he approached young blond women at their cars, forcing or trying to force them at knifepoint to drive to secluded areas.

“Because of what the government is obligated to prove to make it eligible for the death penalty, there will be more evidence of the manner she was bound, the wounds she suffered,” said Tom Heffelfinger, who was U.S. attorney for Minnesota when Sjodin disappeared and when her body was found outside Crookston, Minn., on April 17, 2004.

“They will show how he carried her to the place she was left and raped and murdered her there, and that really gets to the terror he caused her,” he said. “It will be gut-wrenching.”


In detailing Rodriguez’s prior convictions, Heffelfinger said, prosecutors will show how “over the course of time, his pattern has become increasingly more violent.”

The pattern, Heffelfinger said, progressed from “threats, then showing a knife, then stabbing, and finally slashing Dru’s throat.”

The judge “is right to balance the probative value of evidence against its prejudicial impact,” said the former prosecutor, now in private practice in Minneapolis.

But “the case is pretty compelling,” he said.


Heffelfinger said juries in Minnesota and North Dakota don’t have experience in death-penalty cases, “but my sense is they’re going to talk about it and think about it. It’s going to be difficult for them, but they will take their duty very seriously and follow the law.

“I’m really glad they found him guilty. And the facts and the law in this case make the death penalty an appropriate sanction.”

If jurors unanimously decide at least one of the eligibility factors is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the death penalty becomes available.

Then the same jury would embark on a third stage: choosing a sentence, either death or life in prison without parole.

In that final trial chapter, prosecutors would present evidence of “aggravating factors” – the defendant’s criminal history and premeditation again, as well as the allegation that Rodriguez sexually assaulted Sjodin during the kidnapping and killed her “in an especially heinous, cruel and depraved manner” involving torture and serious physical abuse.

Defense attorneys have tried to counter some of those arguments in court filings.

“Something more than a horrible murder is necessary to establish the heinous, cruel or depraved” standard, the defense argued in a motion to strike it from the indictment. “The slash wound to the throat would, in fact, indicate that there was no intent to prolong Ms. Sjodin’s pain or cause her protracted suffering.”

Judge Ralph Erickson denied the defense motion in February, calling it premature.

On Friday, the judge ruled some of the grim autopsy photos disallowed in the earlier phase of the trial that show knife wounds to Sjodin’s body can now be shown to the jury. “Some of these photographs might provide relevant evidence on these issues that words could not sufficiently describe,” the judge wrote.

If the trial reaches the third phase, Rodriguez’s lawyers will offer evidence of “mitigating factors” to urge a life sentence. They have not said what those might be, except to hint at some during jury selection: childhood abuse, mental illness or neurological damage suffered from exposure to farm chemicals.

And the struggle for jurors’ hearts and minds in the first death-penalty case heard in North Dakota in a century will include testimonials from people who loved Sjodin and feel themselves victims, too.

In addition to Lang, the government has impact statements from Sjodin’s college roommate and other friends, and the defense filed a motion in June to block them.


Sjodin’s death “shakes you at the very core of who you are,” Celia Baker wrote. Roommate Margaret Flategraff said that every memory of her college years pulls her back to Sjodin’s disappearance and death.

While the defense “does not in any way diminish the difficulties that these individuals have experienced,” attorney Richard Ney wrote, the statements go beyond what the law allows. So do statements by relatives that include characterizations of the defendant or pleas for a death sentence.

“I hated the man being held for the crime in a way I could never imagine hating someone,” cousin Mollie Anderson wrote. “Nobody should have the fear that a loved one might be lost like we lost Dru, but the release of monsters into our society makes that fear real.”

Dorothy Swanson, an aunt, called Rodriguez “an evil animal . . . a creature of Satan (who) sentenced himself to death the day he murdered Dru.”

Such inflammatory statements, Ney wrote, carry a “very real danger that emotion may serve as the basis of a sentence of death rather than the jury’s reasoned moral choice.”

In its response to the defense motion, the government said statements to the jury will follow guidelines set out in an earlier order from Erickson and be restricted to providing glimpses into the life of Sjodin and “the connectedness that the victim had to her family and the community.”

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(c) 2006, Star Tribune.

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ARCHIVE PHOTOS on MCT Direct (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): Dru Sjodin

AP-NY-09-02-06 1850EDT