Bobbitt Case Goes to Jury; Prosecutors Concede Abuse : Justice: The Commonwealth says maiming was ‘an explicit act of revenge.’ As jurors leave courtroom, defendant bursts into tears.

WASHINGTON —  After a week of explicit testimony that captivated the nation’s attention even as it shocked its sensibilities, the unusual case of the Commonwealth vs. Lorena Bobbitt went to the jury Thursday with the prosecution conceding that Mrs. Bobbitt had been abused by her husband but insisting that she should still be punished for severing his penis in “a calculated and explicit act of revenge.”

As the trial drew to a close and the jury of seven women and five men filed out of the chamber to begin their deliberations, Mrs. Bobbitt, who had been sitting impassively at the defense table throughout the summations, burst into tears.

She had maintained her composure during two days of mostly damaging testimony by prosecution rebuttal witnesses, but in the end the strain evidently proved too much for the 24-year-old Ecuadorean-born manicurist as she slumped over the defense table and began to sob violently.

Earlier, Mrs. Bobbitt herself returned to the stand briefly to deny the potentially devastating testimony of a surprise prosecution witness, who told the court on Wednesday that the defendant had once threatened to castrate her husband in retaliation for his infidelity.

On the final day of testimony, the jury also heard from another psychologist who said that, contrary to the defense claim of temporary insanity, Mrs. Bobbitt was in control of her actions and knew what she was doing on the night of June 23, when she cut off her husband’s penis after he had allegedly raped her.

*

If convicted on a charge of “maliciously wounding” John Wayne Bobbitt, a 26-year-old ex-Marine, Lorena Bobbitt could face up to 20 years imprisonment as well as deportation to Venezuela, where she grew up. However, Judge Herman Whisenant also told the jury it could consider a lesser felony charge of “unlawful” wounding, which carries a sentence of between one and five years imprisonment.

Since the jury received the case only moments before court was scheduled to adjourn for the day, a verdict will not come until today, at the earliest.

As Lorena Bobbitt left the snow-shrouded brick courthouse in Manassas, Va., 30 miles west of Washington, scores of Latino supporters waiting outside in the frigid courtyard waved Ecuadorean and Venezuelan flags and chanted expressions of support in Spanish.

Her weeklong trial, which lasted twice as long as originally expected, attracted wide attention and turned both Bobbitts into household names--not only in the United States but in Latin America and much of Europe as well.

While most women’s rights groups shied away from turning Mrs. Bobbitt’s unusual case into a legal cause celebre, the defense team’s portrait of her as a terrified victim of her husband’s constant physical and sexual abuse clearly aroused a lot of support, not only among women but among Latin-American immigrant communities. Many of the supporters who have waited outside the courthouse to cheer her over the last several days said they came at the urging of Latino radio stations.

Indeed, with even the prosecution’s medical witnesses testifying that they believed Mrs. Bobbitt had been repeatedly raped and abused by her husband, it often appeared throughout the weeklong trial that it was John Bobbitt--not his wife--who was once again facing the jury in the same courthouse where he had been acquitted of marital assault only two months earlier.

*

Although John Bobbitt continued to deny that he mistreated his wife, the prosecution in the end conceded the abuse, with Assistant Commonwealth Atty. Mary Grace O’Brien telling the jury in her summation that even she believed that defense witnesses who testified to John Bobbitt’s brutality “were telling the truth.”

But she disputed the defense team’s “ridiculous” contention that their four-year-long marriage had been a “reign of terror” for Lorena Bobbitt, who she argued had had “ample opportunities” to leave her husband. She also noted that Bobbitt was sleeping at the time his wife mutilated him and therefore had posed no imminent threat that could cause her deed to be construed as an act of self-defense.

“The defense team does not want you to think about the crime. They want to talk about the marriage” which “was in a shambles,” O’Brien conceded. But, she said, “this is not a divorce case . . . but a criminal affair” involving a “calculated and explicit act of revenge.”

John Bobbitt, she added pointedly, “is not on trial here . . . Lorena Bobbitt is on trial and if you believe she caused bodily injury with the intent to maim, injure or kill, as the Commonwealth contends, then you have to find her guilty.”

Defense attorney Blair Howard, in his summation, sought to cast Mrs. Bobbitt’s actions on the night of June 23 in the context of her fear of her husband, the trauma of rape and the diagnosis of both prosecution and defense psychiatrists who said she suffered from severe depressive disorders as a result of what they all agreed had been John Bobbitt’s abuse.

“The evidence is overwhelming. This girl was crumbling. She was falling to pieces” and finally “she snapped,” Howard said, adding that even “if you have the healthiest mind in the world, you get hysterical when you’re raped.”

The prosecution’s case, he added, was “in hopeless conflict” because even its own psychiatric experts contradicted the testimony given by members of John Bobbitt’s family, who said that it was Lorena Bobbitt who was the abusive partner in the marriage.

“This lady is ill and every doctor has told you that,” concluded Howard as he argued for a verdict of not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

That argument, however, received another blow earlier Thursday when clinical psychologist Evan Nelson testified that, while Lorena Bobbitt was mentally ill, she was nevertheless aware of her actions and did not succumb to an “irresistible impulse” to maim her husband as the defense contends.

Jurors’ Options in Bobbitt Trial

The jury in Lorena Bobbitt’s malicious wounding trial has three options in its deliberations:

* Guilty of malicious wounding: Jury decides she injured John Wayne Bobbitt with intent to maim, disfigure, disable or kill and the act was done with malice. Penalty: five to 20 years in prison and a fine up to $100,000.

* Guilty of unlawful wounding: Jury decides she injured Bobbitt with the same intent, but without malice. Penalty: one to five years in prison or up to 12 months in jail, and-or a fine up to $2,500.

* Not guilty: Jury decides she acted in self-defense if she believed she was in danger of great bodily harm by her husband and was in peril of attack. Or jury decides her mind was so impaired that she couldn’t resist the impulse to commit the crime.

Source: Times wire reports