Convicted murderer Mario Kennard Bennett was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment Thursday after a jury recommended that sentence rather than the death penalty in Forsyth Superior Court.
The jury determined that the mitigating factors in Bennett’s case outweighed the aggravating factors.
Bennett, 36, showed no emotion as he looked at the courtroom clerk when she read the jury’s sentencing recommendation.
The jury deliberated for 1½ hours before reaching its sentencing recommendation for Bennett.
The same jury convicted Bennett last Thursday of first-degree murder and other offenses in the death of Shantika Lashae Dunlap, 30, Dec. 12, 2018. She was a mother of four.
Dunlap was reported missing Dec. 13, 2018, and her body was found two days later in a dumpster.
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An autopsy report indicated that Dunlap was suffocated to death.
Judge Todd Burke sentenced Bennett to serve two consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Burke imposed that sentence after the jury also convicted Bennett of being a violent habitual offender.
Throughout the 30-day trial, Bennett never testified in his case.
After the trial ended, James Dornfried, an assistant district attorney, said he and fellow prosecutor Elisabeth Dresel appreciated the jury’s service and respected their verdicts and sentencing recommendation.
Dornfried and Dresel were seeking the death penalty against Bennett.
“They put their lives on hold for five weeks,” Dornfried said of the jurors.
Keith Hanson, one of Bennett’s attorneys, reacted to his client’s sentence and convictions by saying, “Capital punishment and the death penalty don’t have any place in civilized society.”
The death penalty is archaic and barbaric, Hanson said.
“This jury just reflected the changing feelings of the community,” Hanson said.
When the prosecutors and defense had entered the courtroom early Thursday morning, prosecutors told Burke that there was a security concern related to Bennett.
On Wednesday night, a detention officer found that Bennett had broken the window in his cell in the Forsyth County Jail, and that there was a rope made from tied bed sheets hanging out of the window, Dresel said.
Burke asked Bennett’s attorneys, Hanson and Dan Anthony, if they had known about the incident. Hanson replied that this was the first he heard of it.
Burke then asked Hanson and Anthony if they wanted to talk to Bennett about the matter privately and gave them time before the session began.
‘Inevitable’
Dornfried delivered his closing argument to the jury with attacks to the Bennett’s attorneys 16 listed mitigating factors and a recounting of Bennett’s violent crimes.
Dornfried repeatedly described Bennett’s violent behavior as “inevitable,” with rhetorical questions to the jury about whether or not it was inevitable that Bennett would commit such acts such as kidnapping, rape, sodomy and assault as described in witness testimony during the trial.
Before attacking the defense’s mitigating factors, Dornfried described the aggravating circumstances presented by the state.
Dornfried said one of the victims who was strangled and sexually assaulted by Bennett is still traumatized.
“She still can’t say his name a decade later,” Dornfried said. “This wasn’t about sex, it was about violence.”
Dornfried also referenced the testimony from the clerk of court about how Bennett was indicted for the anal rape of a four-year-old boy.
“Imagine that,” Dornfried said. “A four-year-old child. You have to be five to be in kindergarten. It’s difficult to say and think about but you need to do so. There is healing of the body, but not of the mind.”
Later in his argument, Dornfried attacked Bennett’s psychological diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and reactive attachment disorder as having had no effect on Bennett on the day that the murder of Dunlap occurred, referencing the testimony of a man who had worked a job with Bennett who said he seemed normal that day.
A substantial number of the defense’s mitigating factors were centered on Bennett’s upbringing, defining it as chaotic, abusive and neglectful. Dornfried said there was insufficient evidence to categorize Bennett’s parents as abusive and that his mother Pamela was just doing her best when raising him as a single mom.
Dornfried said that no one had testified about Bennett receiving physical abuse from his father, Warren Bennett, and that there was no specific testimony about verbal abuse either.
“Were we in the same courtroom?” Dornfried asked in response to one of the listed factors that Bennett’s childhood had been marked by chaos. “Pamela was doing what was best for [Bennett], looking for another job and an independent school district. [Bennett] changed schools? How does that mitigate a brutal murder?”
In response to other factors that described Bennett as being “institutionalized” and as being the product of a broken system, Dornfried said that Bennett had been diagnosed with psychopathic behavior and that incarceration “brought out what was already inside of him.”
It was doubtful that Bennett being institutionalized at age 17 had everything to do with destroying any opportunity to contribute to society, Dornfried said, because being a child rapist “kind of narrows your ability to get a job.”
“Look upon him,” Dornfried said, pointing at Bennett from across the courtroom. “This is the most dangerous person you will ever encounter. What he has made of his life is an abomination.”
Dornfried told the jurors to consider the weight of others’ lives and safety when assessing whether Bennett’s life had value, citing testimony that while in prison Bennett had threatened a detention officer who then locked himself in a cell to avoid Bennett potentially assaulting him.
At the conclusion of his closing argument, Dornfried held a picture of Dunlap in front of the jury.
“(Bennett) took this beautiful woman and he turned her into this,” Dornfried said, holding up a photograph of Dunlap’s dead body.
“Try holding your breath for two minutes,” Dornfried said. “For minutes, she’s being brutalized by someone she doesn’t know, with a bag over her head. Imagine coming up for air when you’re swimming, and you’re gasping for air.”
For the next two minutes, the courtroom was silent as Dornfried stared at the clock on the wall.
“Look into your heart and then look at him,” Dornfried said. “There’s somebody who has no empathy, no remorse, no guilt. He does deserve the death penalty.”
“Inevitable can be stopped,” Dornfried concluded. “It stops with the death sentence. There will be no more inevitables. There will be no more Shantikas.”
‘Broken system’
When Bennett’s attorney, Keith Hanson, stood for his closing argument, he faced Dunlap’s family and began with an apology.
“Mario deserves to be punished for what he’s done,” Hanson said of the jury’s guilty verdict for Bennett. “He will die as a prisoner. Not only is it life without parole, it’s life without hope.”
Hanson said that the mitigating factors weren’t an excuse and that his goal was to explain and not condone.
Most of Hanson’s closing argument focused on the circumstances of Bennett’s childhood and early adulthood, which was spent with parents who Hanson said didn’t love Bennett.
Hanson said that Bennett’s PTSD was because of complex trauma from Bennett’s experiences running drugs for his brother’s friends at a young age and being sexually abused by them.
“His brothers’ friends were there to fill that void, but they were sexually abusing him,” Hanson said. “How many times do you think they weren’t caught doing that?”
Hanson also reminded the jury of when Bennett’s mother, Pamela Bennett, had taken the stand and he asked her with his first question to tell him something good about Bennett.
“I’m drawing a blank,” Pamela Bennett had responded earlier in the trial.
Hanson said he had asked Pamela Bennett to help him save her son’s life and that she had given him that answer. Hanson also showed Bennett’s mother a photo of Bennett when he graduated kindergarten holding a stuffed teddy bear.
“I asked her to describe what you see,” Hanson said. “She said he looks devious. Why does she hate this kid so much?”
Hanson displayed a record of Bennett’s school attendance from 1993 to 2004 to the jury, which showed that he was in a different school every year. Hanson said that Pamela Bennett withdrew her son from Quality Education Academy (QEA), which his father chose for him, during the middle of the year and during the middle of a school day.
Hanson added that Pamela Bennett had repeatedly requested for her son to be removed from being provided helpful reevaluation services after exceptionally poor test grades.
“He didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to his friends,” Hanson said. “How do you make friends and develop normal relationships?”
Bennett was also witness to an extremely dysfunctional relationship between his parents, which was full of physical abuse, Hanson said.
When Bennett was sent to prison at age 17, Hanson recounted how his mother had “withdrawn” from him and did not visit him or attempt to contact him while he was incarcerated.
“He is on his own, and that’s how it should be,” she said.
Hanson said that he struggles to understand how Bennett ever learned to love his parents in the midst of neglect, abuse and rejection.
In the latter part of his closing argument, Hanson told the jury that Bennett had endured brutal experiences in prison as a young adult that stunted his development.
At the Western Youth Institution in Morganton and the Polk Youth Center in Raleigh, Bennett experienced racism for the first time and had to ask for the meaning of racial slurs such that were used by white correctional officers, Hanson said.
Hanson also referenced how Bennett had sustained injuries in a prison weight room that were so severe that he had to be transported out of the prison for treatment the day before he turned 18.
“You get injuries like that by getting hit in the face with weights,” Hanson said. “There was no rehabilitation in these places.”
Hanson said that Bennett had become institutionalized in a “broken system” while he aged from 17 to 22 around correctional officers and other inmates, not around coaches or role models.
“Remember you live what you learn,” Hanson said. “Maybe what he needed was some therapy. Maybe that would’ve stopped this snowball instead of 6 years in hellholes. Now it’s the same broken system asking you all to kill him.”
Hanson concluded his argument by reminding the jury that the decision they were about to make would resonate with them for the rest of their lives.
“I see before me 12 law abiding citizens,” Hanson said. “Today you are going to sit down in a room and rationally discuss how to kill a human being.”
Hanson then read what would have been the potential death sentence for Bennett.
“I’d rather think of a different quote,” Hanson said after finishing his reading of the sentence. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Show everyone in this community, and your children, that love beats hate. Otherwise, it’s just more death.”