Jury: Mariano guiltyAlvin Mariano raises his head after hearing the guilty verdict at his trial at the McKinley County Courrthouse on Friday afternoon. Mariano was convicted of the second-degree murder of his wife, Olivia James-Mariano, in November of last year.— © 2008 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Phil Stake
Staff writer

GALLUP — Alvin Mariano, 24, was found guilty Friday of second-degree murder.

After little more than two hours of deliberation, jurors filed into the courtroom and took the seats they’d taken a dozen times during the previous three days. The defendant tilted his head back, chin up, and stared anxiously into space as the verdict passed from jury foreman to Judge Grant Foutz, who read it clearly, evoking immediate reactions.

Mariano’s lip began to quiver. His family broke into sobs. Friends and relatives of the victim, Olivia James-Mariano, embraced one another. Bailiffs stood by as the victim’s family left the courtroom first. Asked how she felt about the verdict, James-Mariano’s mother replied, simply, “tears of joy.”

Once the victim’s family had left the building, Mariano’s family left in slow procession, his mother hysterical with grief and surrounded by consoling relatives. Her cries resonated throughout the courthouse and stirred court employees going about their daily routines on the other side of concrete walls.

Mariano faces up to 15 years in prison. The sentence will be determined at a sentencing hearing, which is not yet scheduled. Because of the violent nature of his conviction, Mariano will not be eligible for parole until he’s served at least 85 percent of his sentence, according to prosecutor Jim Bierly.

Bierly’s closing argument wrought sobs from the victim’s father for the first time during the trial. Bierly portrayed Mariano as a frequent abuser with an abrasive personality; as a man who felt burdened by his wife’s jealousy of other women. Bierly overcame the gap in the prosecution’s case by painting a vivid picture for the jury of the event that transpired without witness inside the Marianos’ bedroom.

He painted a picture of Olivia James-Mariano growing enraged by her husband’s infidelity, and of Alvin Mariano permanently stifling her anger.

“We don’t have cameras on every street corner ... in every home ... in every bedroom,” Bierly said. “That would be nice ... because that’s where this crime took place.”

Bierly used Mariano’s violent actions toward his wife as they left the American Bar on Nov. 7, 2007, a brutal slug in the face to which Mariano himself admitted during testimony, to show “what kind of person Mariano is.” He revisited the blood found on Mariano’s pants and underwear, stains which revealed DNA matching that of Olivia James-Mariano. He talked about James-Mariano’s removed wedding ring, which lay inches from her body when police arrived the night of her death.

Bierly used the ring to paint a horrific picture: Alvin Mariano and Olivia James-Mariano have sex on a cold concrete floor; afterward Mariano redresses in order to again visit his ex-girlfriend at the American Bar, a last straw for his fed-up wife; she removes her wedding ring and tells him the marriage is over, that he is finally free to do what he’d like; Mariano repeatedly batters his drunken and reclining wife with enough vicious cruelty to leave 23 bruises on her head and body, including several on the left side of her neck, behind which strong muscles finally gave way to the beating, leaving her carotid artery severed.

As life left her body, the ring fell to the floor.