Jury gives Maestas death penalty

A stone-faced Floyd Eugene Maestas, hands in his pants pockets, stood Friday and listened without visible emotion to a soft-voiced court clerk read aloud the fate a jury handed out for the brutal murder of a 72-year-old woman:

"We ... render a verdict of death."

The nine-woman, three-man jury came to a unanimous agreement after 3 1/2 hours of deliberation.

After his formal sentencing on Feb. 6, Maestas will join nine other men already on death row in the Utah State Prison.

This is the first time a jury has handed out a death sentence in Utah since 1996, when jurors condemned to death Troy Michael

Kell, a white supremacist who killed a black inmate while already in prison.

Taberon Dave Honie, who killed his ex-girlfriend's mother, was the most recent person sentenced to die, in 1999, but his penalty was decided by a Utah judge.

"I think justice was done in this case," prosecutor Kent Morgan said later. "Nobody's happy about a death sentence, but it is justice."

Morgan said the victim, Donna Lou Bott, gave her life in this case and Maestas, who has a 30-year criminal history, has made a practice of brutalizing elderly women.

"What do we do with someone who will not reform?" Morgan asked, adding that when it gets to this point the only reasonable thing to do is "end this criminal career."

In court, Morgan had emphasized how helpless and innocent Donna Bott was at age 72, sleeping alone in her own darkened house, when Maestas burst in, began beating her, stabbed her in the face, ripped her underpants off, strangled her and then, when she was on the floor, stomped on her chest with his boots, rupturing her aorta.

Meanwhile, the defeated prosecution team left the courtroom without comment, except for a brief remark by one lawyer.

They had put up spirited arguments in court and talked at length behind closed doors to try to introduce mitigating evidence that would show how Maestas' chaotic family life, childhood sexual and physical abuse and low IQ made him less culpable for his crimes than a person who functions normally.

But Maestas did not want any unflattering history of his family aired in court and blocked the evidence.

Maestas repeatedly said he would risk death rather than drag his family into the case. In the end, 3rd District Judge Paul Maughan ruled that Maestas had the legal right to reject the use of such testimony — even though doing this might be to Maestas' disadvantage.