BOISE -- Convicted murderer Azad Abdullah was sentenced to death by an Ada County jury Tuesday for the death of his wife, Angie.
Family members cried quietly and one juror dabbed at tears as 4th District Judge Cheri Copsey polled jurors in the crowded courtroom just before noon.
Last week, the same jury found the 27-year-old Boise man guilty of first-degree murder in the Oct. 5, 2002, death of his wife Angie.
The jury also convicted Abdullah of charges of attempted murder and arson for setting fire to his family's home, with four children sleeping inside. The children escaped the fire unharmed.
Prosecutors said Abdullah burned the house to conceal the crime.
Throughout the case, Azad Abdullah declined to testify on his own behalf.
The jury started deliberating the death penalty question Monday. Members concluded that two of four possible aggravating factors were present in the case; only one factor being necessary for a death sentence.
Abdullah was expected to be transported to the Idaho Maximum Security Prison later Tuesday, where he will become the 22nd murderer on Idaho's death row.
The only death row prisoner executed since the 1960s was Keith Eugene Wells, who waived all his appeals and was put to death by lethal injection in 1994.
Abdullah's jury was the second in the state to decide whether to sentence a person to death under a 2003 Idaho law that requires juries, not judges, to make that decision.
The first death penalty handed down by an Idaho jury came Oct. 27, when an Ada County jury decided convicted killer Erick Virgil Hall should die for the murder of Lynn Henneman in September 2000.
