Smith Gets Life Sentence for Drowning Sons

UNION, S.C. —  Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons last fall and then, for a time, persuaded the nation that they had been kidnaped, was sentenced to life in prison Friday.

Smith has said repeatedly since her arrest that she wanted to join 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex in death. But after deliberating 2 1/2 hours, a nine-man, three-woman jury meted out what some contend may be a harsher punishment--a lifetime to contemplate her crime.

Smith closed her eyes and gripped her lawyer’s arm when the verdict was read, but the show of relief was not for herself, her attorney, David Bruck, told reporters.

“She was very relieved for her mother and for the rest of her family,” he said.

Smith’s lawyers had contended that she killed her sons while in the depths of emotional anguish and concentrated their case on witnesses who testified to a history of sexual abuse, including molestation by Smith’s stepfather. The defense argued that Smith had intended to drown with her children but leaped out of the car at the last minute.

But prosecutors, in asking the jury to sentence her to death, portrayed Smith, 23, as a cunning, selfish manipulator who killed her sons for the love of a man who did not want children.

David Smith, her ex-husband, said he was “disappointed” by the sentence. His testimony had been the most wrenching of all during the two-week trial and sentencing proceedings, causing three members of the jury, members of the audience and Susan Smith herself to weep as he tearfully described his love for his children and the way she had deceived him.

“I’ll never forget what Susan has done to me and my family, and I’ll never forget Michael and Alex,” he said outside the courthouse. “As for forgiving, that’s something I’m going to have to deal with, I guess, further on down the road.”

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Smith, who is being kept in solitary confinement and under 24-hour suicide watch in prison, will be eligible for parole in 30 years. Before the trial, she had offered to plead guilty in return for the exact sentence the jury handed down, but Union County Solicitor Tommy Pope chose to seek her death.

Pope said Friday that he did not regret the decision, despite what he called the “terrible toll” the trial had taken on David Smith, his family and on the community. “It was something that had to be done,” he said.

In his closing argument to the jury, Pope called the drownings “the most horrible crime that anyone can ever imagine” and contradicted defense witnesses who described Smith as childlike in her vulnerability and innocence. “For nine days she manipulated David, their families, the community, the nation, the world,” he said. “She looked every one of us in the eye and lied.”

Defense lawyers contended Smith was traumatized by her father’s suicide when she was 6 and by the sexual abuse she endured at the hands of her stepfather, Beverly Russell.

Pope conceded that a parent’s suicide can have a long-lasting effect on an individual, but he argued that Smith had a choice on the night of Oct. 25 when she rolled her car into the lake with her sons strapped inside.

“It all goes back to choice,” he said. “Michael and Alex had nothing to do with . . . her choice to engage in [sexual] conduct with Bev Russell, not as a child but just weeks before their death.”

On Thursday, Russell, a local businessman who had been active in the Christian Coalition and served on the executive committee of the state Republican Party, said he deserves part of the blame for Smith’s actions. He admitted molesting Smith as a teen-ager and said he resumed a sexual relationship with her in 1993.

Russell wept silently in his seat after the clerk of the court read the sentence. He then made a hasty retreat from the courtroom with the rest of Smith’s family.

While psychiatrists and counselors testifying for the defense portrayed Smith’s frequent sexual liaisons, sometimes with married men, as the result of her emotional distress, Pope noted that she’d slept with both the manager and assistant manager at a local supermarket where she worked and then, at her next job, with the boss and the boss’ son.

“When you’re looking at Susan Smith as a victim,” Pope said, “consider her motives. Consider her reasons for what she did.”

But Bruck told the jury that Pope had presented no evidence to back up his claims about Smith’s motives. “The state’s case is entirely circumstantial as to why Susan Smith should be sentenced to death,” he told the jury in a closing argument that seemed aimed as much at reason as at the jurors’ hearts.

The manipulating, selfish woman Pope portrayed is a fictional character, Bruck said. “The state has not produced a single witness to put their hand on the Bible to say they’ve ever laid eyes on this person.”

“You don’t convict people in a court of law, much less sentence them to death, on circumstantial evidence,” he said.

Noting the anguish and remorse Smith was said to be suffering since the drownings, he asked the jury to sentence her to life in prison. “That is punishment for anybody under any circumstances, but it is a special kind of punishment for her.”

Reviewing the picture that had been painted of Smith’s childhood in a house marked by bickering, divorce, suicide and molestation, Bruck called it “a house ruled by depression.”

“Part of the terrible puzzle of this case . . . is that mothers who love their children don’t just up and kill them for a passing fancy,” he said. “That is something about people that we know is true--that is a given. That is common sense.”

And, repeating the testimony of witness after witness, Bruck said Smith loved her children. “They were her heart,” he said.

Smith did not testify during her trial and declined to make a statement to jurors before their deliberations began. In an earlier hearing, a psychiatrist had testified that, while Smith was competent to stand trial, she might attempt to sabotage her defense if she were allowed to testify.

South Carolina last executed a woman in 1947. Although there are 40 women currently on death rows across the nation, experts say juries generally are reluctant to sentence women to death. Nationwide, only one woman has been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the early 1970s.

Outside the courthouse, long lines of spectators who had been unable to get inside waited in the sun for word of the sentence. Some of them had come from more than 100 miles for the trial.

“I’m very disappointed,” said Linda Garner of Greenville, S.C. “I think of the children, and they didn’t have a second chance.”

Others said the verdict would bring a sense of closure and hoped that it would allow the community, which has been torn by the tragedy and the trial, to heal.

Shirley Crask noted that many of her neighbors still contend Smith should die for what she did. “They can heal themselves if they can get rid of the hate,” she said.

Bruck got the verdict that he wanted, but made no claim afterward of a good outcome. “There is no good outcome to this case,” he said. “This case was an awful human tragedy, and it still is, and it always will be.”