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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Susan Smith Convicted Of Murdering Her Sons Jury Now Must Decide Whether She Gets Life In Prison Or Electric Chair

Washington Post

Susan Smith, trembling and softly crying, was found guilty of murder Saturday night by a jury that now must decide whether to sentence her to death for the drowning of her two children in a case that shocked the nation and forever changed a little Southern town.

The nine-man, three-woman jury deliberated for 2-1/2 hours before convicting Smith, rejecting defense arguments that the 23-year-old mother acted in a suicidal panic Oct. 25 when she released the hand brake on her car and sent it rolling into nearby John D. Long Lake with the tiny boys still strapped in their safety seats.

The cavernous white courtroom was still as the verdict was delivered. Smith’s mother buried her face in her hands, while the defendant’s former husband, David Smith, stood quietly across the aisle, a photograph of his dead sons in his shirt pocket.

“She knew it was wrong and she had a choice,” lead prosecutor Tommy Pope shouted in his closing arguments. “She made a choice that she would end the lives of those boys. That choice was one thing Michael and Alex Smith never had strapped in the car, screaming for help.

“This case screams - just as Michael and Alex screamed - this case screams out for a verdict of murder,” Pope said.

But defense attorney Judy Clarke implored the jurors to have compassion for Smith, portrayed as a pitiable incest victim obsessed with suicide, tormented by failed relationships and desperate for love.

“This is not a case about evil,” Clarke said. “This is a case about despair and sadness. She had choices and decisions. Her choices were irrational and her decisions were tragic.

“She made a horrible, horrible decision to be at that lake that night. She made that decision with a confused mind and a heart without hope.

“Confusion is not evil and hopelessness is not malice.”

For the past 12 days, the trial has torn away at the soul of this deeply religious community of 10,000 with its dark revelations of incest and adultery, suicide and secret sorrows.

At the center of this gothic tale sat Susan Smith, pudgy and pale, jiggling her foot, biting her nails and rocking herself gently for hours on end at the defense table, her head usually bowed.

Smith earlier turned down a chance to address the jury herself, which Circuit Judge William Howard told her was her right in a death penalty case.

“You understand that you have the right to address the jury?” Howard asked her.

“I’ve decided not to, sir,” Smith replied.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Howard then gave instructions to the jury, including an option to find Smith guilty of lesser charges of involuntary manslaughter if they decided she had acted out of recklessness rather than malice. A conviction would have carried a maximum penalty of five years on each charge.

But prosecutors had maintained that Smith deliberately killed 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex that autumn night in a twisted attempt to salvage her romance with a wealthy bachelor who had told her he did not want children.

The defense argued that Smith had a long history of depression and drove aimlessly around Union County that night in panic and despair, ending up at the lake intending to kill herself and take her children with her so they would not grow up motherless.

Witnesses said Smith had been traumatized by her own father’s suicide when she was 6 years old.

During four days of testimony, the court heard of Smith’s elaborate lie to cover up the murders by reporting that the children had been abducted at gunpoint by a black carjacker.

The story triggered a nine-day nationwide manhunt, and the streets of Union filled with people who prayed, wept and searched for the missing boys as Susan Smith tearfully appealed for their safe return on television.

Jurors interrupted their deliberations once Saturday to review tapes of her news interviews.

The sheriff who led Smith in prayer and coaxed a confession from her Nov. 3 testified about her overwhelming remorse, telling the jury Smith asked him for his gun so she could kill herself.

Social workers, psychiatrists and acquaintances took the stand to tell of Smith’s sexual molestation at the age of 15 by her stepfather, Beverly Russell, a prominent figure in Republican Party politics and once a local leader of the Christian Coalition.

Testimony also revealed that Smith was having what she described as an affair with Russell two months before the murders, and that she also had slept with her boss, his son, a married man and her own estranged husband.

Curious spectators slowly filled the old courtroom or milled outside on Main Street as word filtered through the hot summer evening that the jury was deliberating.

There was Smith’s 11th-grade English teacher, now retired, sitting in the back row remembering how pretty and vivacious she was.

There was the young couple who remembered Susan Smith at their wedding three days before the murders.

There were the co-workers from the textile plant where Smith worked as a secretary, tsk-tsking among themselves over the illicit office affairs now public record in the State of South Carolina vs. Susan Smith.

Among the last witnesses to testify was Smith’s cousin, Leigh Harrison, 22, who remembered Smith sitting in a rocking chair late one evening, trying to soothe her two fussy babies.

“Lord, Susan, I don’t know how you do it,” Harrison recalled saying.

She said Smith then smiled at her faintly and replied, “Sometimes all three of us just sit here and cry together.”

Pope sought to erase the touching image with a searing one of his own, reminding the jurors how Smith by her own admission ran up the hill from the boat ramp after the car went rolling into the lake.

“They were screaming and crying and calling their father,” Pope speculated.

“She was holding her hands over her ears because she could hear her babies crying out her name.”

Since Smith admitted to killing her children and the defense did not attempt to mount an insanity or mental illness defense, the guilty verdict came as little surprise to either legal observers or the spectators who followed the case.

The defense’s biggest battle lies ahead when the penalty phase begins Monday and jurors will weigh arguments that will ultimately determine whether Smith will be put to death.

South Carolina has executed four men since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976.

MEMO: Cut in the Spokane edition

Cut in the Spokane edition