Appearing on the stand for her third day of cross examination, Jodi Arias visibly began to crack Tuesday under the increasingly aggressive questioning of the prosecution in the trial of the 2008 killing of her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander.
A photographer from California, Arias is charged with the the gruesome first-degree murder of her ex-boyfriend Alexander in his Arizona home in June 2008, in which she allegedly stabbed the then 30-year-old man 27 times, before slitting his throat and shooting him in the head.
Prosecuting attorney Juan Martinez wasted no time in tearing into Arias' consistent failure to remember important aspects of the case, while she was able to answer her own lawyer's questions easily with clarity and in explicit detail.
"Do you have a problem with your memory?" Martinez asked, according to The Huffington Post.
"I don't think I have a problem," Arias replied.
"But you are having a problem answering my questions, right?" Martinez prodded, according to the Associated Press.
"I'm not having a problem telling the truth," Arias responded meekly.
Martinez has pounced repeatedly on Arias' seemingly convenient memory loss of the most important aspect of the trial, sniping that it was interesting her memory of killing Alexander was so spotty, yet you "can tell us what kind of coffee you bought at Starbucks sometime back in 2008."
Arias has tried to explain away many of the inconsistencies in her stories, claiming her memory was foggy the day Alexander died. Arias has wavered back-and-forth between providing surprisingly acute details surrounding the murder to claiming she has little to no memory of certain pieces of the case, such as the actual act of killing Alexander, saying her memory of the fateful day has "huge gaps," according to The Tri-City Herald.
"My mind wasn't right during all that period," Arias claimed. "It's like I wasn't accepting it in my mind... because I never killed anyone before," she said.
Seeking to further underline her lack of credibility, prosecuting attorney Martinez focused on the many outright lies and inconsistencies in Arias' version of events. As he tried to establish a pattern of the defendant's habitual refusal to tell the truth, he played the court more clips from an interview Arias did from jail with CBS's '48 Hours' in July 2008. In one part of the footage, Arias said she was "angry and outraged" that Alexander was murdered. "I cannot imagine what his family is going through," Arias claimed.
Martinez reminded the court that during the time the interview took place, Arias was still telling authorities, as well as Alexander's friends and family, that the then 30-year-old man had been killed by masked intruders at his Arizona home.
Arias has already admitted to lying about Alexander's death to just about everyone. She first claimed she was never at Alexander's home the day he was killed, then she invented the masked intruder angle, and finally she backtracked to admit she killed the victim, but claimed it was in self-defense, as he attacked her in the shower, forcing her to fight for her life. Martinez discussed these various lies as evidence that Arias knew she was guilty and was trying to cover her tracks to avoid prosecution.
Martinez then brought in a new piece of evidence: a message Arias wrote in the guestbook at Alexander's memorial service. In part, she wrote, "Travis, you're beautiful on the inside and out."
"So you think somebody who masturbates to pictures of little boys is beautiful on in the inside, right?" Martinez asked, referring to Arias' earlier testimony that she caught Alexander masturbating to pictures of young boys once, a crux of the defense's portrait of Alexander as a devout Mormon virgin on the surface, but a "sexually deviant" abusive control freak underneath.
"I don't think that aspect of him is beautiful at all. I think it's sickening," Arias responded.
"He hated those parts of himself. It's not who he wanted to be ... I believed that he could get better ... I believe he had aspects of himself that are beautiful and ugly, just as I do," Arias said.
Cross examination was abruptly halted in the middle of Martinez's incendiary barrage, and court was recessed early for the day, according to AP. Arias' attorneys claimed she wasn't feeling well.
Arias faces the death penalty if convicted, the Associated Press reported. Cross examination resumes for the 49th day of the trial Wednesday afternoon.
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