Jury Begins Deliberating on Sentence for Panah : Courts: Defense attorney pleads for the life of ‘tortured boy.’ Prosecutor calls the killer of 8-year-old Nicole Parker ‘just plain evil.’

A defense lawyer for Hooman Ashkan Panah urged jurors Friday to spare the life of the convicted child-killer because of his youth and “wretched” upbringing by an over-controlling and abusive mother.

“I cannot imagine we’re going to kill this tortured boy,” said defense attorney Robert Sheahen. Panah is 23.

At one point during his closing arguments in the trial’s penalty phase, Sheahen spoke so negatively of Panah’s mother, Mehri Monfared--telling the jury that his own contacts with the Iranian emigre had been “unbearable”--that Monfared left the courtroom, sobbing.

“You’ve seen her on the witness stand, you saw her testify for nearly five hours,” Sheahen said. “Can you imagine spending five months, five years . . . your whole life with her?”

The impassioned plea for mercy capped an emotionally grueling trial in Van Nuys Superior Court in which Panah, a former Pierce College student, was convicted last month of the 1993 sodomy-murder of 8-year-old Nicole Parker.

The jury began deliberating Panah’s sentence late Friday, after Sheahen and Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Berman finished their closing arguments in the penalty phase of the trial. The jury is scheduled to return to court on Tuesday, after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday.

Throughout the trial, Monfared’s outbursts have been the subject of repeated comments by Judge Sandy R. Kriegler, and on Friday Monfared became so upset at the lunch break--weeping loudly as jurors filed out of the courtroom--that the judge admonished her again.

“There’s no reason for you to go into the hallway and wail away in front of the jurors, who are only doing their job,” Kriegler said. “If you cannot abide by that, it may be better for you to leave while the trial goes on.”

Monfared’s noontime outpouring began as Sheahen graphically described execution procedures and the alternative punishment he recommended to the jury--life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“You sit alone in a cell 23 1/2 hours a day with no human contact,” Sheahen said. “Try that for a month, or 10 years . . . or 50 or 60, and then tell me that the ‘L-walk’ is lenient,” he said, using prison slang for a life sentence. “It’s not lenient.”

Ed and Lori Parker, parents of Panah’s victim, sat stone-faced as Sheahen quoted from Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens, former Gov. Pat Brown and Elvis Presley in his effort to dissuade the jury from the death penalty.

But when Sheahen said death should be reserved for only the “worst of the worst” cases and that Nicole’s suffering “within the context of death-penalty cases was not great,” the Parkers pursed their lips and shook their heads.

They cried quietly as prosecutor Berman reminded the jury of Nicole’s “horrible” death--that she had been lured into Panah’s Woodland Hills apartment and raped, sodomized and strangled before he stuffed her body into a suitcase.

Then, as Ed Parker frantically searched door-to-door for his missing daughter, Panah feigned concern, offered to look around the neighborhood, and allowed the family to suffer for the next 36 hours until Nicole’s body was found, Berman said.

“This is one of those crimes, ladies and gentleman, where justice really demands the death penalty,” Berman said.

He also dismissed defense claims that Panah was mentally ill, the warped product of childhood beatings, possible sexual abuse and constant belittling by his mother, who testified she would slap him and call him a “faggot” whenever he upset her.

“This is a young man who didn’t have the greatest circumstances in his life . . . but none of that excuses what he did,” Berman said. “Millions of people have had similar experiences or even worse, and they didn’t turn out to be murderers.”

Berman called Panah manipulative, self-centered and arrogant. “His final victim,” the prosecutor said, had been his own mother, who was willing to demean herself on the witness stand--telling jurors she had slept and showered with her son--in an effort to save his life.

Although he praised Monfared for the courage to divorce an abusive husband and leave a repressive homeland with her young son, Berman also suggested that much of her testimony and behavior had been contrived to gain sympathy.

“There’s a difference between madness and evil,” said Berman. “And everything in this case points to the fact that Mr. Panah is just plain evil.”