Jury deadlocked; cop killer gets life

After a deadlock, a request from the judge to try again and another two hours of deliberations, a Philadelphia jury this afternoon returned and said it could not decide if Rasheed Scrugs should be executed or spend life in prison for last year's murder of police Officer John Pawlowski.

The stalement among the eight women and four men on the Common Pleas Court jury resulted in Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes imposing the mandatory life in prison with no chance of parole.

Even before the jury returned to the big courtroom at the Criminal Justice Center at 2:50 p.m., the family of the slain 25-year-old officer knew what the result would be.

Kimmy Pawloski, 26, the officer's widow and mother of the son and namesake who was born four months after his death, began weeping, comforted by her father-in-law, John Pawlowski, 59, a retired police lieutenant.

Across the courtroom, Scrugs' mother, Annah Abdul-Ghaffar, sat, hankerchief covering her mouth, tears running down her cheeks as her only son prepared to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Judge Hughes immediately imposed the sentence, taking on an consecutive, additional 20-40 years for Scrugs' guilty plea to the attempted murder of Pawlowski's partner, Mark Klein.

Scrugs said nothing before he was sentenced.

She then turned to the Pawlowski family and police officers in the audience and asked them to understand the jury's inability to decide and not to look at it as a failure of the system.

"Mrs. Pawlowski, I know you can't really hear me but I hope one day that you will," the judge said. "It didn't matter whaqt the verdict was. . . . No matter what they said, nothing was going to frix it, nothing was going to give you back your husband, your best friend."

The jury had resumed deliberations this morning followed an equally unusual session Friday during which the eight-woman, four-man panel said it was deadlocked on the question of execution or life imprisonment and Hughes asked each juror to write her a note assessing the situation.

Defense lawyers for Scrugs objected to the procedure, which resulted in the jury deciding to keep working, but the judge was apparently persuaded by a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a similar action that was submitted by prosecutors.

Jurors must be unanimous in imposing the death penalty and in the event of a deadlock, the judge must sentence a defendant to life in prison without parole.

But to get to that point, the jury must weigh what the law calls aggravating and mitigating factors. Some of the aggravating factors, which support the death penalty, are inherent in Scrugs' decision to plead guilty: killing an on-duty police officer, endangering the lives of bystanders at the shooting scene, and a history of violent crime.

The jury must decide if the aggravating factors are outweighed by mitigating factors about Scrugs' personal history and the circumstances of the crime.

Scrugs lawyers had argued that those mitigating factors include his childhood abandoned by his father, his low-intelligence and difficulty coping with everyday life, his use of PCP and marijuana and his remorse in pleading guilty.

Scrugs, 35, a paroled robber from West Philadelphia who had been laid off and was working as a gypsy cabdriver, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder Oct. 21 on the first day of his trial.

That moved the case into the penalty phase, in which the jury must decide whether Scrugs should spend his life in prison without chance of parole or die by lethal injection.

Pawlowski, 25, an officer for five years who was recently married and an expectant father, was shot to death by Scrugs when the officer and his partner responded to a 911 call from a cabbie, who said Scrugs had roughed him up and was menacing him.