Smithfield — A Johnston County jury deliberated about an hour and half today without reaching a verdict in the trial of Lynn Paddock, accused of killing her 4-year-old son, Sean.

The jury is scheduled to resume deliberations Thursday.

In a final argument earlier today, a prosecutor today flashed a picture of the child's dead, shrunken body on a courtroom screen and told jurors of the terror the boy must have felt in the final minutes of his life.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," said Paul Jackson, an assistant district attorney. "The pleas for help that went unanswered. It's like he gave up. The world with Lynn Paddock held nothing for him but pain and terror and misery, and it cost him his life."

Jackson asked jurors to convict Paddock of first-degree murder on grounds that the child was tortured. He also asked them to consider convicting her under the theory of felony murder, meaning that the child's death resulted from the felony of child abuse.

If the jury finds Paddock guilty as charged, she would spend the rest of her life in prison. Jurors may consider the lesser charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

Jackson reminded jurors of the unorthodox discipline Paddock unleashed on her adopted children, including striking them with a plastic plumbing supply line.

He swung a piece of the line for jurors; it whistled as it sliced through the air of the silent courtroom.

Jackson argued that abuse turned the children into virtual robots.

"These were not children who were just polite," Jackson said. "These were children who were like robots. They were afraid to do or say anything. That's soul murder. That's taking the child out of a child."

Paddock testified Monday that she didn't mean to kill Sean, who suffocated when he was wrapped tightly in blankets in February 2006.

But another assistant district attorney, Kelly Sandling, pointed out that she had admitted binding him in blankets for five nights during the week he died.

"You don't do something for five nights in a row and call it an accident," said Sandling.

Paddock's attorney Jack O'Hale argued that Paddock had no reason to think Sean would die from the wrapping.

He said Paddock and her then-husband, Johnny, welcomed trouble into their lives when they adopted foster children already exposed to tremendous abuse. The couple adopted six children; Sean was the youngest.

"They took in kids no one else wanted," O'Hale said.

O'Hale said that Paddock learned to parent from her mother, who has been described as a tyrant who severely abused Paddock and her step-siblings.

And he attacked the prosecution's star witness, Dr. Sharon Cooper, a forensic pediatrician who said Paddock tortured her children.

"She was brought to you to sell something," O'Hale said. "Her product was her agenda: abuse and torture."

He suggested that the children who testified had exaggerated the level of abuse inflicted by Paddock. He said Johnny Paddock would not have tolerated such severe abuse.

"You think [Johnny] was permitting this to go on," O'Hale said. "It wasn't what the state portrayed it to be. It wasn't the torture, the conduct you've heard described in this case."

Jackson, however, denied that the children had overstated the abuse.

"What in the world would anyone have to gain?" Jackson asked jurors. "You know what [the children] had to gain. They had to come into this courtroom, with strangers, with the scariest person they've ever known in their life and talk to you about the worst aspects of their lives."