NEW YORK (AP) – Holding up one victim’s bloodstained leather coat, a prosecutor on Monday urged a jury to impose a death sentence on a man convicted in the execution-style slayings of two undercover police detectives during a 2003 gun sting.

Ronell Wilson “slaughtered two innocent men, taking from them everything they were and everything they would be,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Smith said in closing arguments at the federal death penalty trial in Brooklyn.

Wilson’s attorney, Kelley Sharkey, told jurors they faced the “ultimate moral decision” in choosing whether Wilson should spend the rest of his life behind bars or die by lethal injection.

“You must be able to say to yourself that 24-year-old Ronell Wilson is beyond hope, is beyond redemption,” Mr. Sharkey said in her closing argument at the trial’s penalty phase.

At the guilt phase of the trial last month, the same jury convicted Wilson of two counts of murder, along with robbery, carjacking and firearms charges. The jury deliberated two hours on Monday afternoon without reaching a decision about a sentence; it was to resume Tuesday morning.

Prosecutors claim the defendant knew that Rodney Andrews and James Nemorin were undercover detectives when he climbed into the back seat of their unmarked car on the pretense of selling them an illegal gun on Staten Island. Both officers were shot in the head, Nemorin after he pleaded for his life.

An accomplice testified that he and Wilson were in on a plot by a violent drug gang to rob the undercover detectives, believing they were carrying $1,200 to buy guns. But the defense contends there was no convincing evidence the men knew their victims were police officers.

In the penalty phase, prosecutors made the case for execution by presenting emotional testimony by the detectives’ widows. The defense countered with anecdotal evidence of Wilson’s troubled background as the son of a crack-addicted mother living with a dozen relatives crammed into an apartment at a crime-infested housing project.

“His early years were filled with drugs and chaos,” Mr. Sharkey said Monday.

Mr. Smith showed jurors the last photo ever taken of Andrews, wearing a leather jacket and posing with his children at a wrestling show at Madison Square Garden. The prosecutor then displayed the same jacket, still caked with dried blood from the night he was shot.

He also cited a rap lyric authorities say Wilson scratched out after the shootings: “I ain’t gonna stop until I’m dead.”

Any verdict “should speak to the cold reality that Rodney Andrews and James Nemorin – two of the good guys – are no more,” he said.

Wilson was one of seven people arrested in the case. The other six pleaded guilty to various charges.