A Sacramento County trucker, who spent his murder trial cracking jokes and proudly admitting that he had killed his sister and her husband in their El Cerrito home, celebrated his birthday Tuesday by being sentenced to die by lethal injection.

Edward Wycoff had asked to be sentenced Tuesday, his 41st birthday.

"Welcome to my birthday party! Is everyone having fun? Is everyone having a good time?" he bellowed in a Martinez courtroom filled with friends and relatives of the slain victims and many jurors from the trial.

Wycoff, clutching a Monopoly "Get out of jail free" card, didn't get what he told the court he really wanted: his release from custody so he could go back to hauling commercial explosives, "running people off the road and blowing things up."

Instead, Judge John Kennedy of Contra Costa County Superior Court formally sentenced him to die for murdering his sister, Julie Wycoff Rogers, 47, and her husband, Paul Rogers, 48, after he broke into their hillside home on Rifle Range Road early Jan. 31, 2006.

Wycoff, a Citrus Heights resident who acted as his own attorney in the trial, said he had killed the couple because he thought they were too liberal, were raising their children wrong and because they hadn't invited him over for Christmas.

Kennedy said it was clear that Wycoff had committed "wanton murder" in reaction to "petty slights, perceived transgressions and imagined insults."

The judge rejected Wycoff's automatic appeal for the punishment to be reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Jurors deliberated just 70 minutes before returning their verdict last month in the penalty phase of the trial. The same jury had taken only 45 minutes to convict Wycoff of two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances for using a knife and a wheelbarrow handle to kill the couple, who left behind three children.

Eric Rogers, 21, the couple's eldest son, had told jurors his uncle's life should be spared. He later said his parents had opposed capital punishment.

Rogers said in a courtroom statement Tuesday that Wycoff is "completely childish and sick and immature. I think it's very clear he struggles with a mental illness.

"For us to kill a crazy person would be wrong," Rogers said. "I would hate to see that done in my parents' name."