The Utah Attorney General's Office hopes to hear a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court as early as next month about reinstating a life-without-parole prison term for Mark Anthony Ott.
A 6-year-old girl died when Ott intentionally set his estranged wife's house on fire Sept. 1, 2002. Ott cut the phone lines to the Layton home of Donna Ott, who had filed for divorce three months earlier and had a protective order against him.
He then broke into the home and stabbed Donna Ott's boyfriend, Allen Lawrence, 23 times. He also stabbed his wife's teenage daughter, Sarah Gooch, when she tried to intervene. Ott then doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire.
Everyone inside the house escaped except for Lawrence's 6-year-old daughter, Lacey Paige Lawrence, who died from smoke inhalation.
Ott pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and several other aggravated felonies in exchange for prosecutors dropping the death penalty.
In April 2004, a 12-member jury in Farmington sentenced him to life without parole.
But in January 2010, the Utah Supreme Court overturned Ott's sentence and ruled his rights were violated because Ott's stabbing victims and Lacey's mother and sister testified that Ott was remorseless.
They also testified they did not believe Ott would ever change and feared for their safety if Ott were ever released from prison.
"We believe the Utah high court was wrong in reversing the jury's sentence of life without parole," Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said in a news release Friday.
"We are therefore seeking justice from the U.S. Supreme Court for the victims of this brutal crime.
"Young Lacey Lawrence, who was killed in the fire Ott set, as well as his stabbing victims and Ott's family members whom he terrorized for years and still fear his release, deserved to be heard and to see him locked up forever."
The National Crime Victims Institute filed a friend of the court brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the state's appeal.
The petition asks the justices to hear the case to address whether a crime victim -- in a death penalty case -- has the right to comment on the character of the defendant, the circumstances of the crime and the appropriate sentence.
The high court has held since 1987 that victims in a capital case do not have that right, Laura Dupaix, chief of Shurtleff's appeals division, said in an interview.
The thinking is to eliminate all potentially inflammatory evidence in what is the most serious of cases, a death penalty case, she said.
Such victim commentary is allowed in all other cases.
"We think we have some good issues for them to consider, that should interest them," Dupaix said.
Because defendants in a death penalty case are allowed at sentencing to put on all manner of character testimony from relatives, employers and so on, Dupaix said it's "only a matter of fairness that victims likewise should be allowed to present evidence that contradicts that."
She also argues that jurors considering sentence won't be prejudiced by a victim's strong opinions because they've already heard the evidence in the case and convicted the defendant.
"Allen Lawrence called Mark Ott a murdering terrorist," Dupaix said. "Allen was there that night. He was stabbed 23 times. He saw his house go up in smoke and lost his daughter.
"For him, Mark Ott is a murdering terrorist, which the jury would surmise anyway."
Dupaix said she expects a decision toward the end of February from the high court on whether it will consider the petition for a writ of certiorari, as it's called.
"It's always a long shot," she said. "They get 8,000 writs for certiorari a year, and they only take up less than 100."
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