The JACKS Children - 2008 - Washington D.C.

A D.C. woman convicted of killing her four daughters and living with
their decomposing bodies for months is returning to court for a hearing
on her refusal to use an insanity defense.Banita Jacks was found guilty in July of four murders. She faces life in prison and had been scheduled to be sentenced Friday.But
defense lawyers are still questioning Jacks' refusal to use an insanity
defense. They are asking the judge to appoint an independent counsel to
investigate.Prosecutors oppose the request, and a U.S.
attorney's office spokesman says the judge is expected to hear
arguments on the issue Friday. It's unclear whether the sentencing will
go forward.U.S. Marshals discovered the bodies of Jacks' daughters - ages 5 to 16 - in January 2008 when they came to evict her.

Banita Jacks, convicted of murdering her four young daughters, was
sentenced Friday to 120 years in prison by a judge who said evidence
photos of the dead girls in Jacks's squalid Southeast Washington home,
where she kept their decomposing bodies for months, "will probably
haunt me for the rest of my life."

As Jacks, 34, listened impassively, D.C. Superior Court Judge
Frederick H. Weisberg rejected a defense request for a lesser
punishment and imposed four 30-year prison terms, climaxing a case that
horrified even longtime police officers and boldly underscored
deficiencies in the District's child-welfare system.

"These children were incredibly vulnerable," prosecutor Deborah
Sines told Weisberg. "These children were betrayed by the one person
who's supposed to protect all of us: the mother."

Deputy U.S. marshals delivering eviction papers Jan. 9, 2008, found
the remains of the girls, ages 5 to 16, in two bedrooms of a rowhouse
in the Washington Highlands neighborhood. Jacks, who had been living as
a recluse in the house with no electricity, told police that her
daughters had died in their sleep, one by one, and that she believed
that they were "possessed by demons."

Pathologists later concluded that the girls had been dead for at
least seven months. The eldest appeared to have suffered stab wounds to
her abdomen, and the other three had been beaten and strangled,
autopsies found.

In asking for the maximum sentence possible -- life without parole
-- Sines said the girls were kept so cloistered by Jacks that
investigators were unable to learn much about them after their deaths,
especially the two youngest, N'Kiah Fogel, 6, and Aja Fogel, 5. What
little authorities did find out about the girls, Sines said, was
gleaned by detectives who sifted through the filth of the house like
archeologists, examining children's drawings on walls and scraps of
paper.

Referring to Jacks's relatives in the courtroom Friday, the
prosecutor said, "No family member submitted any victim-impact
statements for these children," from which officials might have learned
about their lives.

"All we can tell you is, they liked Dora the Explorer and, I think
it was called, SpongeBob SquarePants," Sines told the judge, who
convicted Jacks of murder and child-abuse charges after an eight-day
non-jury trial in July. "That's all we could find," Sines said, "and it
came from a funeral program."

Jacks, who did not testify at the trial, declined to make a statement in court Friday.

She sat at the defendant's table in shackles and a blue D.C. jail
frock, occasionally frowning, shaking her head and whispering to one of
her three attorneys as Sines spoke. Although her attorneys had
repeatedly urged Jacks to allow them to pursue an insanity defense in
her trial, she would not let them do so.

"Ms. Jacks has earned the maximum sentence," the prosecutor argued,
objecting to a defense attorney's request for a sentence that might
have allowed her to go free after 30 years.

"Each life was important; each girl could have fulfilled any dream,"
Sines said of the Fogel siblings and their dead half sisters, Brittany
Jacks, 16, and Tatianna Jacks, 11. "She has earned life imprisonment."

One of Jacks's attorneys, David Norman, asked Weisberg to impose a
30-year term without parole for each murder and allow Jacks to serve
the sentences concurrently. In three decades in prison, he said, his
client could receive the psychiatric help she needs while the public
would be protected, and it would give her a chance to be free someday.

"It's a difficult time for the family of Ms. Jacks," said Norman,
gesturing to a dozen men and women with grim expressions seated in two
rows of the courtroom gallery. "They do love their daughter, their
sister, their aunt, their niece, in spite of the facts -- that is, the
deaths of four girls. They still love the mother of those four
children."

Weisberg said that as he thought about concurrent sentences --
essentially one prison term for four deaths -- he "could not conceive
of any reason why" he should agree to the request. "Because each of
these lives matters," he said. But he declined to impose life without
parole, saying four consecutive 30-year terms without parole would have
the same effect.

Even with mandatory time off for good behavior, the sentences would run for 102 years.

The gruesome discovery in Jacks's home in the 4200 block of Sixth
Street sparked furious criticism of the city's long-troubled Child and
Family Services Agency. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) fired six agency
employees, saying they failed to respond properly to a school social
worker's warnings about Jacks in 2007. An arbitrator later ordered the
reinstatement of three of the employees.

From the bench Friday, Weisberg said the case had affected him like
no other in his three decades as a jurist. He began presiding over the
case in February 2008. What happened to the four girls, illustrated by
the evidence photos, he said, "has intruded on my conscious life
virtually every day in those two years."