A judge Monday will sentence a former Fort Carson soldier to life in prison without parole for the October 2008 rape-murder of a 19-year-old woman.

Fourth Judicial District Judge Larry Schwartz is scheduled to impose the mandatory sentence on Robert Hull Marko at 1:30 p.m. for the slaying of Judilianna Lawrence, whose naked body was found with her throat slashed 2.7 miles up Old Stage Road southwest of Colorado Springs. They had met via the Internet on Marko’s MySpace page.

Gazette Legal Affairs reporter John Ensslin will be live blogging from the courtroom during the hearing. Stay tuned to “The Sidebar” blog at http://thesidebar.freedomblogging.com/ for updates.

While the outcome of the murder sentence is a given, the hearing will be an opportunity for Lawrence’s relatives to address the judge.

On Feb. 3, a nine-woman, three-man jury took about 10 hours over two days to find Marko guilty of first-degree murder plus two counts of sexual assault and two counts of attempted sexual assault.

Soon after the verdict, the victim’s father, John Lawrence, told reporters outside the courtoom: “My baby gets some justice.” The father attended every day of the trial, although he sat outside the courtroom for some of the testimony.

“They talked a lot about what was wrong with him (Marko) and nobody talked about what happened to my baby,” he said, tears running down his face.

Lawrence said he was glad that a prosecutor reminded the jurors why they were there.

“We weren’t here for him. We were here for my baby. I’m glad they remembered that,” Lawrence said. “Because no matter what happened, if his parents decide to forgive him, they can go to jail and see him. No matter what, I got a little rock,” he added, referring the headstone on his daughter’s grave.

Marko’s public defenders argued during the trial that the 23-year-old Iraq war veteran was legally insane at the time of the murders and that his mental illness dated back to when he was a child growing up in Michigan.

It was then, after years of neglect and abuse, that he developed an alternate personality known as “Rex 290,” a lethal black raptor dinosaur. They argued that Marko would retreat into that persona whenever he was confronted with stressful situations.

They contend that’s what happened on the day Lawrence was murdered.

But prosecutors countered that Marko’s actions following the murder showed he was not psychotic, but rather a cold, calculated killer who gave various versions of what had happened before leading El Paso County Sheriff’s deputies to where they found Lawrence’s body.

Rich Maines stocks up for another lap as his son, Jackson, 7, watches. Photo by Dena Rosenberry, The Gazette