Jurors issued their verdict shortly before 5 p.m. Friday. During their deliberations, jurors asked the judge for further interpretation of the premeditation element of first-degree murder. Campbell admitted responsibility in Domenie's death at the couple's Cary home last July, but he claims he did not intend to kill her.

The trial will enter the sentencing phase next week, and jurors will decide whether Campbell should receive life in prison or the death penalty.

Also on Friday, jurors were allowed to see the applications for Campbell and Domenie's life insurance policies. Prosecutors had alleged that Campbell killed Domenie, a Raleigh teacher, to collect on an insurance policy. Campbell had testified to jurors earlier that he did not need the money since he had a $110,000-a-year job in Rocky Mount.

However, the judge refused jurors' request to review the testimony of Magalie Lelong. Lelong was reportedly seeing Campbell at the time of Domenie's death. He told them that jurors would have to try to remember what was said on the witness stand.

I shouldn't have been amazed. I knew going in that the 30-year-old Campbell wouldn't get a death sentence because he doesn't fit the profile of people who do. They're black, mostly. Campbell's white. They've grown up in poverty; one parent, if that; often sexually abused as children; gotten into drugs; gotten into trouble; prior records. Campbell was a Boy Scout, literally; degrees in engineering; $10,000 a week job, no down payment needed on a four-bedroom Cary keeper; both parents, and brothers, in court with him throughout the trial.

Most of all, the poor slugs who are sentenced to die get inexperienced lawyers at best, and all too frequently criminally negligent ones. Campbell's family paid for Tommy Manning and James Crouch, and I'm tempted to say they gave him a better defense than he deserved, but no, every criminal defendant, and certainly every defendant on trial for his life, deserves the best possible defense, yes?

Right now, the state House of Representatives is thinking about a bill, already passed by the Senate, for a two-year moratorium on the death penalty while we examine its use, or misuse. Here's a head start, taken from a study by UNC-Chapel Hill researchers and the Common Sense Foundation: Of the 1,000 homicides committed in North Carolina annually, only about 28, or 2.8 percent, result in a death sentence; the chances are lowest (1.7 percent) when both the killer and victim(s) are non-white; 2.6 percent when they're both white; they jump to 6.4 percent when the killer is non-white and the victim(s) are white.

Oh, I know, it's supposed to be the "aggravating" and "mitigating" circumstances, and the judge in Campbell's case spent half an hour just reading to the jury about how to decide about those things and how much weight to give them. (According to the "totality" of things. And the 12 jurors must be unanimous about whether something's aggravating.)

And then the jury was back. No aggravating factors, they announced. The prosecutor, Howard Cummings, had proposed two. One was flimsy: The $750,000 insurance policy ("pecuniary gain") that looked so suspicious it wasn't even issued at the time of the killing, and Campbell knew it might not be. But the second wasn't flimsy at all: The murder was "especially heinous and cruel," Cummings argued, because Campbell--by his own account--strangled Domenie to death, which took at least four minutes of her fear and her pain.

Well, it was heinous, the defense admitted. But not especially heinous, "as these things go" (Manning). Pleading for his son's life, Aulden Campbell told the jury that Ian was "not Jeffrey Dahmer, or the Washington sniper, he's a young man who made a very tragic mistake."

***

Goodness and Mercy: Ian made a mistake, and then lied about it. And kept lying about it, saying he didn't do it, right up to the trial. Then, facing the prospect that he was going to be convicted of first-degree murder regardless, and maybe executed, too, if he didn't come clean, Campbell told a different story. He admitted the killing, but said he didn't remember it (attempting, unsuccessfully, to dodge premeditation), except that they were face-to-face, Heather slapped him, and when it was over, he was still facing her, horrified at what he'd done.

Let's review. Campbell, child of privilege, kills his fiancee, with whom he's lived for four years, so he can be with his new love, a younger, sleeker, richer woman. He kills Heather, rather than just leave her, because he's a coward. He lies about it, and is still lying, because the physical evidence couldn't be clearer that he didn't kill her face-to-face, he strangled her from behind (not a mark on him, therefore).

If you believe in the death penalty, here's your case. If you don't, you'll agree with James Crouch, Campbell's co-counsel: There's no excuse for what he did, no justification "in the law or the code of human responsibility." And yet, he is human, and he is capable of redemption, of doing whatever you can to make something right that can't be made right. "He's got good in him," Crouch said. "And if you give him an opportunity, he can come to peace with this."

Amen.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Jurors never believed a Canadian man's story that he strangled his fiance during a heated confrontation over his infidelity, the jury foreman said Thursday.

John Butler said he and the 11 other jurors believed the prosecution's assertion that Ian Campbell strangled Heather Domenie from behind in the couple's Cary home last year. Campbell was convicted last week of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison Monday. Prosecutors said he strangled Domenie to collect on a $750,000 US insurance policy. Butler said jurors did not believe that Campbell, 30, ever told Domenie about his affair.

"We never believed a word he said," said Butler, a former principal with the Wake County School System. Butler also said that Howard Cummings, Wake's first assistant district attorney, "did a masterful job portraying the guy as a liar."

Domenie and Campbell met in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the spring of 1998. In the fall of 2000, they moved to the Raleigh area, where Campbell worked as a computer consultant and Domenie as a first-grade teacher.

On July 25, Campbell called paramedics to their home, where they found the 33-year-old Domenie lifeless in the bedroom. Campbell insisted he didn't know what had happened to his fiancee.

But as jury selection began in the trial, he said in court papers, repeating the story on the stand, that he attacked Domenie during a fight over the affair.

Campbell could have faced the death penalty, but Butler said jurors felt that the life sentence was appropriate. But, he said, he still wonders why it happened.

"How could somebody who lived this life make such a drastic change?" Butler asks. "What was going on there?