Jury to Weigh Fate of Man Who Murdered 9-Year-Old : Penalty trial: Richard Lucio DeHoyos does not plead for his life from the witness stand. His attorney says he has already expressed remorse for killing Nadia Puente.

After considering whether to take the witness stand to express remorse and plead for his life, Richard Lucio DeHoyos on Monday decided to let his attorneys try to persuade a jury not to sentence him to death for killing 9-year-old Nadia Puente.

If the jury, which will begin deliberations this morning, does not sentence him to die in the state’s gas chamber, DeHoyos, 34, will serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The same jury convicted DeHoyos last month of kidnaping, sexually assaulting and asphyxiating the fourth-grader on March 20, 1989, in a Santa Ana motel and later leaving her body in a trash can in Griffith Park.

The same jury also found that he was sane at the time he committed the crime, which he admitted in a taped confession played in the courtroom.

Before the jury entered the courtroom Monday morning, Orange County Superior Court Judge W. Everett Dickey asked DeHoyos whether he wished to take the witness stand, reminding him that “the jury may take from your silence a lack of remorse.”

DeHoyos replied that he wished to make a statement, but that he did not want to answer any questions. The judge said that arrangement was not possible and called a recess to enable DeHoyos to confer with his attorneys and decide. When court reconvened, DeHoyos said he decided not to testify.

Milton C. Grimes, DeHoyos’ co-defense attorney, said during a break that DeHoyos had expressed his sympathy and remorse in at least one earlier interview with police, “so there was no need for him to testify” Monday. “The decision was his.”

The main problem with DeHoyos’ taking the stand, Grimes said, was that “he has a mental illness . . . and that mental illness evidences itself when I have discussions with him.”

Recalling an earlier courtroom outburst, while listening to a replay of his taped confession, Grimes said, “His behavior is explosive. He is impulsive. He is rash. . . . He understands that uncontrolled part of him, and he has to admit that that’s a vulnerability that (would be) very injurious to him if he took the witness stand.”

Defense and prosecution attorneys alternated in their closing remarks to the jury, each side speaking twice. While there was no evidence presented that DeHoyos had been convicted of any previous felonies, both prosecution and defense attorneys referred to murderous attacks by DeHoyos on two of his nine legal and common-law wives.

For Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Gannon, the heart of his closing argument was a brief recitation of the facts of the crime.

“The rape, sodomy, molestation, suffocation of a 9-year-old child, the desecration of her body--about 14 or 15 words,” Gannon said. That sentence, he said, pointed out, more than anything, “the inadequacies of language.”

Holding a color photograph of the smiling girl, he asked the jurors to “think for a minute, just for a second, what went through that child’s mind when he had his hands around her and her head goes under water--the utter terror, the horror of that.”

With at least one juror and several of the victim’s family members in the spectator section weeping, the prosecutor talked about the “desecration” of the little girl’s body, that DeHoyos treated it like “nothing more than a piece of trash.”

Gannon asked, is it “right to extend to him something more than he extended to that little child? Is that just? . . . The appropriate penalty in this case, the appropriate penalty for this defendant, is death.”

Marne Glass, DeHoyos’ other attorney, began by saying that Nadia Puente was “taken too soon” from life.

Still, she asked, “what happens when we lose respect for life, even Richard’s life? . . . I believe Richard’s life should be spared. I think that our evidence has shown that he has suffered from a mental illness” manifested by the attacks on his wives.

DeHoyos could be sent to prison, Glass said, “where you will not have these problems from him, and this can be done without taking his life. . . .

“Richard will die in prison, one way or another. He will be executed or he will spend the rest of his life in prison, where he will die a natural death.”

Glass concluded by saying that “Richard is a human being. He has done a horrible, horrible thing. But mankind should still spare his life.”