(MOBILE, Ala.) (AP) March 18 - After the defense called no witnesses, a judge scheduled closing arguments to open Thursday morning in the trial of a man accused of killing four young children by tossing them from an Alabama coastal bridge.
Defense attorney Arthur Powell said he could not discuss the decision to not call any witnesses for 38-year-old Lam Luong at his murder trial. Luong also declined to testify when Judge Charles Graddick gave him the opportunity on the third day of trial testimony.
If Luong is convicted, jurors will deliberate on a recommended penalty and have two choices: either death or life in prison without parole - but the judge isn't bound by the jury's recommendation.
Prosecutors rested the state's case Wednesday afternoon after forensics testimony about autopsies on the four children, whose bodies were recovered within weeks of the Jan. 7, 2008 bridge tragedy.
Earlier, the jurors heard testimony on the discovery of the bodies.
Commercial fisherman Ricky Brown testified that he had his video camera on to record rough weather off the Louisiana coast when he spotted an object bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico. Brown told the jurors he pulled his boat closer and recognized a child's body that the Coast Guard had alerted fishermen to help find.
Brown had come upon the last missing body of the four children.
"I took this video to record how I felt that day. It was a bad feeling," said Brown of Vancleave, Miss. He said he had hoped a jury would one day view his video.
He got that wish Wednesday.
As 50-70 mph winds churned the Gulf, the little body of 2-year-old Hannah Luong was recovered on Jan. 20, 2008, just over 5 miles east of the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Prosecutors also called as witnesses two Mobile County duck hunters - John J. Sprinkle and Leon Ladnier - and Mississippi Marine Officer Scott Chatom, who found the bodies of the other three children on separate shorelines from Bayou La Batre to near Pascagoula, Miss.
Luong, a Vietnamese refugee and part-time shrimp boat worker from Irvington, appeared to look down and away from the overhead screens as jurors viewed photographs of the children taken at the watery sites where they were found during the two-week search of shorelines from Mobile to Texas.
Luong, who pleaded not guilty, is accused of throwing Hannah, Ryan Phan, 3, Lindsey Luong, 1, and Danny Luong, 4 months, off the Dauphin Island bridge into the cold Mississippi Sound after arguing with his common-law wife, 23-year-old Kieu Phan. Ryan was fathered by another man but the others were their children, authorities said. But Luong raised Ryan from infancy.
Earlier witnesses testified that they saw Luong on the two-lane bridge next to a parked van on the morning the children disappeared.
Police also testified that Luong had a 16-year cocaine addiction that his family partly blamed for the deaths.
Luong came to the U.S. from Vietnam when he was 14 years old and never became a U.S. citizen.
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
