Jury Says It Felt No Sympathy for Murderer : Penalty: Members of panel criticize defense portrayal of Thornton as a victim of a learning disorder and parental neglect. Says one juror: ‘It wasn’t a reason to go out and kill anybody.’

It took eight weeks for defense attorneys to paint a sympathetic picture of convicted killer Mark Scott Thornton as a brain-damaged, tortured youth.

It took a jury only seven hours Monday to reject that notion and sentence the Thousand Oaks man to death for the murder of Westlake nurse Kellie O’Sullivan.

“I found that Mark had no redeeming qualities whatsoever,” said homemaker Patricia Johnson, 55, of Oxnard. “He is not a person I would like in my neighborhood. He brutally murdered somebody, and I don’t think that was fair. I don’t think he is a fair person. And I don’t think he ever was.”

Even though Thornton’s lawyers spent the last two months trying to focus the jury on their client and his upbringing, jurors said they were never able to take their minds off O’Sullivan, who was abducted during broad daylight and shot to death in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Many jurors characterized the vote as the toughest decision of their lives. But they said they will be able to sleep peacefully at night because Thornton, through his actions, made the decision for them.

“It was a tough decision,” said juror Sandy Bechdolt of Newbury Park. “It’s a heavy thing to live with. I’m mad at (Thornton) for us having to decide whether he lives or dies.”

“I’m not going to make light of it,” said juror Keith Creighton, 38, a federal government worker. “But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, either.”

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Most jurors sharply criticized the defense portrayal of Thornton during the penalty phase of the trial as a victim of a learning disorder and parental neglect.

“The stuff in his background,” said juror Carlos Chacon of Simi Valley, “we just didn’t buy.”

Thornton abducted O’Sullivan in her black Ford Explorer, drove her up winding roads into the rugged mountains lining Mulholland Highway and shot her once in the chest and twice in the back, according to testimony.

Defense attorneys called 46 witnesses to bolster their argument that Thornton’s life and values were shaped by neurological and family problems.

Defense attorneys argued he may have suffered brain damage during birth, a delivery that was accomplished with steel forceps. They also said their client suffered from a learning disability that caused him to fail kindergarten and spend the entire rest of his school career in special education.

But perhaps even worse, defense attorneys argued, was the mental and physical abuse Thornton suffered at the hands of his own mother and stepfather. The couple testified that they had regularly used drugs while raising Thornton, and that they often had loud quarrels.

Jurors said that after listening to four months of testimony, they agreed soon after beginning deliberations that the defense argument was bogus.

“It wasn’t a reason to go out and kill anybody,” juror Jerome Kochanski of Santa Paula said of the defense theory.

Even if some aspects of it were true, other jurors said, Thornton still knew right from wrong.

And killing O’Sullivan, an absolute stranger and mother of a young boy, was wrong, they said.

As juror Keith Creighton said, the decisive issue was “the simple fact that there’s a little boy out there without a mom.”

Instead of putting stock in the defense argument, the jurors said, they relied more on the court’s instruction to weigh the crime against other factors that might mitigate it.

The bottom line, they said, is that they saw no evidence Thornton was sorry for what he did, and thus they decided not to show him any mercy.

The one factor that the defense thought would play in Thornton’s favor was his relatively young age. He was 19 at the time of the crime, and is 20 now.

But the jurors said they thought that, too, was not enough to outweigh the seriousness of the crimes.

“I don’t think his age had anything to do with it,” juror Peggy Judy of Ventura said. “He was an adult at the time of the murder.”

The verdict was not unanimous from the start.

When deliberations began Friday morning, only about six of the members voted for death, said forewoman Tammy Wilson, 32.

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When the group reconvened Monday after the weekend break, all but one member voted for death.

The holdout juror--a Catholic--was having trouble reconciling his choice with his church’s opposition to the death penalty, other jurors said. He resolved the questions in his mind by falling back on his jury oath to uphold the law, they said.

“Catholics don’t believe in death (sentences). But he came around,” Johnson said.

Bray is a staff writer and Stoll is a correspondent. Staff writers Miguel Bustillo, Carlos Lozano and Kenneth R. Weiss contributed to this report.