NEW YORK – Hand me a tissue, please. I’m about to be sick. Criminal defendants who lie through their tears in an effort to engender our sympathy deserve an extra consecutive sentence tagged onto their punishment.

Take for instance Bobby Cutts Jr., an Ohio police officer who was found guilty Friday of aggravated murder, a death penalty-eligible crime. The verdict was reached just four days after he led us down a tearful garden path on the witness stand.

A blubbering Mr. Cutts tried to persuade the world he was so frightened after “accidentally” killing his girlfriend, Jessie Davis, nine months pregnant at the time and the mother of his 2-year-old son, that he wrapped her body and dumped her in a national park, abandoning the toddler at the murder scene.

The hungry child was found wandering in a soiled diaper, near an open bottle of bleach (Prosecutors said it was used to destroy forensic evidence.) more than 24 hours later. For nine days, Davis and her fetus were left to rot, while 2,000 volunteers searched for her, and while Cutts pleaded with the country for her safe return.

It brings to mind Susan Smith, another peach of a criminal defendant, who back in 1994 tried to convince everyone that she’d been the victim of a carjacking in which a black man had abducted her two precious baby boys. The story was simply riveting. For nine days we listened to her repeated pleas for the safe return of those boys. Then police discovered Smith had strapped those children into their car-seats and rolled the vehicle into a lake, drowning them to appease her boyfriend. She’s serving 30 to life in South Carolina.

Next up, Scott Peterson, the murderous husband who in 2002 killed his wife, Laci (also nine months pregnant). For four months, Laci Peterson’s body and that of their unborn son, Conner, decomposed under the waters of San Francisco Bay. All the while, Peterson tearfully navigated his way through countless interviews, pleading for us to help find his beloved wife. But a jury convicted him of the crime, and he is now rotting on death row.

The unbridled insolence, the contemptuous gall, and the shameless audacity of these uncommon criminals all serve to highlight why we employ aggravating and mitigating penalty phases in American jurisprudence. Some people’s crimes are beyond the pale. And just when you think they can’t get any worse, they do. These liars cry like babies, and beg for our love and our sympathy. More often than not we oblige. But when their duplicitous deceit is exposed, we at least get retribution, sentences that equate to a lifelong “time-out” or a deadly “lights-out.”

– Ashleigh Banfield, In Session anchor