Jodi Arias reportedly filed a request to fire her defense attorney three days before her court appearance on Thursday.
In her written request to let Kirk Nurmi go, she accused the main member of her defense team of having an "utter poverty of people skills," along with demonstrating "little to no tolerance for my emotional and psychological shortcomings," The Arizona Republic reported. Arias said that she hadn't seen Nurmi since May 23 when a jury could not decide unanimously on whether to give her a sentence of life in jail or death for the murder of her former lover Travis Alexander.
Arias reported that her second-in-line attorney Jennifer Willmott has performed most tasks in the case. She also claimed that she tried to let Nurmi go in June, but was not given the go-ahead to do so by a judge.
The court has scheduled another hearing for Nov. 1.
Arias made a court appearance on Thursday, during a meeting between the prosecution and the defense that was not open to the media. Both sides convened to discuss a potential retrial on Arias' penalty phase, which has been up in the air for the past four months, after Arias was pronounced guilty of first-degree murder. Following her conviction, jurors couldn't come up with a decision whether to sentence her to the death penalty - since then, lawyers have been parsing out a settlement that might potentially close the case.
According to AZ Family, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said that the state will most like try to sentence Arias to the death penalty. But after meetings with the victim's family and multiple probes into the killing and subsequent media storm, authorities have agreed to resolve the case without another trial.
If the defense and the prosecution settle, Arias will be sentenced to either life in prison with a parole option after 25 years in jail, or natural life in prison, which requires the prisoner to stay within facility walls until death.
