'We are all on death row,' Mobile man says after getting death sentence

A man who killed his estranged wife and her boyfriend 2 years ago must die by execution, a judge decided today.
Mobile County Presiding Circuit Judge James Graddick upheld a jury’s recommendation and sentenced Derrick Shawn Penn to death for the May 2009 deaths of Janet Penn and Demetrius Powe. Penn, 44, shot his wife and then beat Powe to death in an apartment in Mobile’s Birdville community.
“We are all on death row,” the defendant told Graddick after he pronounced judgment.
A jury in February convicted Penn on 4 counts of capital murder — 2 counts for each victim on killing more than 1 person and killing someone during a burglary.
Jurors voted unanimously to recommend the death penalty for 3 of those counts and split 10-2 in favor of execution on the 4th.
“We’re, of course, pleased that Judge Graddick took the jury’s recommendation on all 4 counts of capital murder,” Mobile County District Attorney Ashley Rich said. “We think the jury made the right decision.”
'Nothing . . . outweighs his responsibility for his heinous acts'
According to testimony at trial, Penn showed up at his estranged wife’s apartment on Eagle Drive early one morning of May 27 — 9 days after Janet Penn had filed for a protection-from-abuse order against the defendant. He chased her into a bathroom before shooting her twice. His gun jammed, prosecutors said, so he used it to pistol-whip Powe until he died.
According to prosecutors, Janet Penn had left her husband 2 years earlier, but couldn’t afford a divorce.
“Janet Penn and Demetrius Powe did not deserve to be killed in that apartment the early hours of May 27, 2009,” Graddick wrote in his sentencing order. “Penn wanted Janet back and she did not want him, so since he could not have her, he made sure no one else would either.”
Penn’s attorneys had tried to convince jurors that the defendant deserved life in prison without parole. They offered testimony that Penn had suffered abuse at the hands of his father as a child and that he had seen his father beating his mother.
But Graddick was unmoved.
“Nothing Derrick Penn has presented in mitigation outweighs his responsibility for his heinous acts or the value of what he has stripped away from the children and families of Janet Penn and Demetrius Powe,” the judge wrote.
Relatives of both victims spoke during the sentencing hearing. Rich said it was harder for relatives to lose their loved one to a perpetrator they knew well.
“The hardest part about this case is each family knew the defendant because they had been married,” she said. “In a sense, their pain was doubled.”