Scenes from a death hearing

Defense lawyer Jack McMahon stood in front of a panel of Philadelphia jurors last Thursday doing his best to convince them to spare the life of his client, Shaun Warrick.

​A day earlier, the 32-year-old Warrick had been found guilty by the same jury of two counts of first-degree murder in the 2011 Valentine's Day shootings of his ex-girlfriend, Tiffany Barnhill, and her cousin, Marcedes Ivery.

Because the District Attorney's office designated it a "capital" case, the trial had moved to a penalty-phase hearing for the jury to decide if Warrick should be sentenced to death or life in prison without possibility of parole.

Early in what would be a 50-minute speech to the Common Pleas Court jury of six men and six women, McMahon stopped to praise the man who had just argued that Warrick should be sentenced to death.

McMahon called Assistant District Attorney Thomas Lipscomb "a real gentleman" and told the jury that he and Lipscomb were performing their designated roles in the criminal justice system's ultimate high-stakes competition.

Watching murder trials for a living, you have the privilege of seeing people at their worst and their best. More than once, the mother of a murder victim has embraced the mother of the killer and left court together, commiserating over their shared tragedy. You also see lawyers doing their best to achieve what passes for justice in an imperfect system. The adversarial arguing and conflict that is a staple of courtroom dramas is there, but so is integrity and professionalism.

What the jurors considering Shaun Warrick's fate did not know was how much Warrick had been doing to help get himself on Death Row. Warrick and his mother had consistently refused to provide any biographical information that might help McMahon put together a mitigation case -- a reason for the jury not to sentence Warrick to death.

The dynamics of the mother-son relationship never were clarified. But the anteroom arguments between McMahon and Warrick's mother were so loud they could be heard in the courtroom. Judge Glenn B. Bronson even took the unusual step of a closed-door hearing involving only McMahon and Warrick and his mother. Later, in court, Bronson recapped the stalemate: Warrick said he wouldn't let his mother testify unless he knew what she would say; Warrick's mother wouldn't testify unless he asked her and he wasn't asking. Warrick told Bronson that McMahon had failed to properly prepare him and his mother for the penalty-phase hearing, which McMahon angrily said was a "100-percent lie."

Later, while McMahon was arguing to the jury, Warrick scrawled with a common street vulgarity to the man trying to save his life.

So why was McMahon praising Lipscomb? The veteran defense attorney had a plausible case for mitigation: Warrick was an only child raised without a father and had no juvenile criminal record or any adult convictions for violent crimes; he graduated from high school and put in three years at the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore where he played Division 1 basketball. McMahon's problem was that, given his client's attitude, he had no way to prove it to the jury.

What Lipscomb did, with the concurrence of his superiors, was agree to stipulate that all McMahon's mitigation factors were true, meaning the jury had to accept the factors as true as if witnesses under oath had testified about them. That agreement let McMahon use that information in his closing to the jury.

Lipscomb still argued that Warrick's mitigating factors did not outweigh the aggravating factors in a double murder and he urged the jury to "impose the sentence that [Warrick] chose himself: death."

The jurors, selected because they swore they could fairly consider imposing a death sentence, listened intently to the prosecutor. One female juror wiped tears from her eyes, another appeared to be shivering in her chair.

"This process, this thing you thought you might never have to do, is now before you," Lipscomb said.

The jury deliberated three hours before telling the judge it could not unanimously decide on a penalty. Warrick was automatically sentenced to two consecutive life prison terms.

Afterward, Lipscomb said he had not spoken to any jurors after they were dismissed. But watching them as he argued for death, Lipscomb said "I had a gut feeling this jury was not going to return a death sentence."

Outside court, relatives of the slain cousins approached McMahon and started questioning about the case. Most said they had hoped for a death sentence but also said they were glad Warrick would never get out of prison. The meeting was cordial on both sides.

"I'm still having trouble getting my head wrapped around this," said Kelley Hunt, Tiffany Barnhill's sister and Ivery's cousin, referring to the murders.

"Don't try to wrap your head around it," said McMahon, a homicide prosecutor long before he became a criminal defense attorney. "There's no way to wrap your head around it. It's like trying to pound a square peg into a round hole."

McMahon urged Hunt and her family to focus on their futures: "You can't change three o'clock. You can change four o'clock"