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| Russell Bradshaw NSB News Photo by Sera King |
DELAND -- It took the jury 90 minutes to recommend a sentence of life imprisonment Monday for convicted Edgewater killer Russell Charles Bradshaw in the Sept. 25, 2006, beating, strangulation and throat-slash slaying of Lisa Memro. Circuit Judge James R. Clayton took less than two minutes to impose it.
Not one to mince words, Clayton told the unemotional Bradshaw: "They decided you should lose your liberty, but not your life."
Clayton then handed down a life sentence without the possibility of parole for first-degree capital murder and then tacked an additional 15 years for sexual abuse of a dead human body.
The jury's recommendation of life over death by lethal injection came just hours after Bradshaw took the stand for the first time, denying he was responsible for the 21-year-old New Smyrna woman's homicide.
"I know in my heart that I wouldn't hurt Lisa just like I know in my heart there's a God," the 22-year-old Bradshaw said sheepishly on the witness stand, even as prosecutor Matt Foxman grilled him about his so-called memory loss after he called 911 and told the operator, "I just killed someone."
Bradshaw told the jury Monday, "It was an extremely traumatic event for me so I'm not really clear on what happened."
And then Bradshaw alibied his way out of the killing, telling Foxman: "There is no reason why I would have done this. I can't think of a reason why anyone would do this?"
Pressed by Foxman about the bloody crime scene, include a literal bloodbath in the tub, a semi-naked corpse on the bed that he had sex with and a bloody serrated knife in the sink, Bradshaw conceded, "I have bits and pieces. I remember seeing blood in the bathroom. Um, I remember seeing bits and pieces. I have no solid or accurate memory of what occurred."
Bradshaw's attorney, Rob Sanders told the jury his client had a tough upbringing and was a cocaine addict. Other mitigators or reasons to spare his life included his age, only 20 at the time of the killing.
Foxman countered that "In this society, tough childhoods are not uncommon, but not everyone who experiences one goes on to commit murder."
The prosecutor told the jury the state's two aggravators --or statutory requirements to outweigh mitigators for a death sentence had been proven. Mainly that the killing was done in a "cold, calculated and pre-meditated" fashion and that the manner in which it was done was especially "heinous, atrocious and cruel."
Foxman reminded the jury of seven women and five men, "The medical examiner told you that Lisa Memro was alive at every stage of this attack -- the beating, the strangling, the cutting."