Jury holdout comfortable with sentence

SAN CARLOS — Scott Peterson's last hope for life rested with a juror who took a little longer than others coming to terms with condemning a man to die for his crimes.

But once the decision was made Monday, it was final, said juror Tom Marino this week in a lengthy interview with The Bee.

"I'm very comfortable and at ease with the verdict," the 55-year-old man with strong religious convictions said at his San Carlos home. "No doubts, no second thoughts."

Other jurors said Marino had been the last holdout leaning toward a recommendation of life in prison without parole for Peterson.

The 32-year-old fertilizer salesman from Modesto killed his pregnant wife, Laci, and used a solo fishing trip on Christmas Eve 2002 as cover to dump her body in San Francisco Bay.

"It was a serious matter and we all (jurors) gave it the seriousness it deserved," Marino said.

Ultimately, jurors deliberated 11 hours, 32 minutes over parts of three days, weighing whether Peterson should be executed. That doesn't count a two-day weekend break that jurors spent guarded by sheriff's deputies in a Foster City hotel, to lessen the chance of being tainted by news reports.

"He ruined my weekend," Marino's wife, Barbara, said with a smile.

Sometimes, doing the right thing takes time, Tom Marino said. After all, a man's life was at stake.

While waiting for a decision, TV pundits made much of Marino's statement during jury selection in the spring that he had talked to a priest about the death penalty. That might suggest a reluctance to vote for lethal injection, regardless of the circumstances of a crime, analysts speculated.

This week, Marino elaborated.

"I'm not against the death penalty," he said, but acknowledged that he consulted with clergy because of Roman Catholic tenets on the sanctity of life.

"All of a sudden, you're in the jury chair. How would you feel?" Marino said, noting he was raised in a tradition-respecting Italian family.

"(Peterson) did something terrible. But even people who aren't religious might have a hard time" voting for death, he said.

The Marinos lived and worked in San Francisco, raising three children who now are adults before moving a few years ago to a hilltop home on the Peninsula. Tom Marino, a former U.S. Postal Service carrier, officially retired Nov. 26 — in between the guilty verdict and death sentence.

During the trial, which began June 1, Barbara Marino sometimes would meet her husband for lunch in nearby Redwood City. They followed the judge's warning not to talk about the trial, they said.

"That was my house — the kitchen and the back," Tom Marino said Tuesday, motioning away from his living room where a television was tuned to Peterson news coverage. Barbara Marino spent hours there alone for more than six months, they said.

"Imagine you can't go home and tell your wife what you did at work that day," he said.

Two feet from the TV is a wood-burning stove. Barbara Marino said she had trouble firing it up — that's her husband's job — during his first sequestration, which lasted nine nights before the Nov. 12 verdict.

Jurors were mostly confined to their hotel floor, Tom Marino said, except for escorted trips to the roof two times a day for 30 minutes each. Sundays weren't bad, he said, because they were allowed to watch football on a large television in a conference room.

Said juror Richelle Nice: "The deputies had the remote control, which I'm sure made the men (jurors) crazy."

Sometimes they were allowed to watch movies, Nice and Marino said. Their hotel had a gym and swimming pool, but they weren't allowed to use them.