Life Term Given Mother Who Drowned 2 Sons : South Carolina: Susan Smith is tormented in her 'own lake of fire,' lawyer argues. Juror calls her a 'really disturbed person.'

L.A. Times Archives

July 30, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> From Associated Press</i>

UNION, S.C. — A jury swiftly rejected the death penalty for Susan Smith, sentencing her to life in prison Friday after her lawyer argued she is tormented enough in her own “lake of fire” for drowning her two young sons. She will be eligible for parole in 30 years.

For nine days last fall, Smith insisted that a black man had commandeered her car as she drove on a dark, empty back road. She begged tearfully on nationwide television for her sons’ safe return, at last confessing Nov. 3 that she had popped the car’s safety brake and rolled it down a ramp into John D. Long Lake with the boys still strapped inside.

She cried again Friday as she was led from the courtroom after the jury announced its unanimous verdict, reached after just 2 1/2 hours of deliberations.

The boys’ father, David Smith, sat stone-faced, later telling reporters he and his family were “disappointed, but it wasn’t our choice on what penalty she was to receive.”

Smith, whose wrenching testimony about losing his sons reduced several jurors to tears, said he could not imagine visiting Smith in jail and was thinking of moving away from Union to escape the memories.

“I’ll never forget what Susan has done to me and my family, even I’d have to say to her family. And I’ll never forget Michael and Alex,” he said.

“But forgive, that’s something I’m going to have to deal with, I guess, further on down the road.”

Prosecutor Tommy Pope defended his decision to seek the death penalty, saying he would do it again.

“This community can begin to heal,” Pope said. “It’s taken a tremendous toll . . . but it’s something that had to be done.”

Public opinion in Union, a town of 10,000 people, shifted from favoring the death sentence shortly after the crime, growing more sympathetic as Smith’s troubled past, including sexual abuse by her stepfather, became known.

Smith’s lawyer, David Bruck, said, “There is no good outcome to this case. This case was an awful human tragedy and it still is and it always will be.”

After the verdict, Circuit Judge William Howard told jurors their choice was “the toughest moral decision anyone has to make.” The jury had taken the same amount of time July 22 to convict Smith of murder.

“We all felt like Susan was a really disturbed person. And we all felt that giving her the death penalty wouldn’t serve justice,” said juror Deborah Benvenuti.

Smith, 23, didn’t testify during her trial and declined to make a statement to jurors before their deliberations began.

She was put on suicide watch in a cell monitored by closed-circuit television and with a guard walking past every 15 minutes, prison spokesman Robyn Zimmerman said. For the first few days, she will not be allowed visitors.

In his closing argument in the penalty phase of the trial, Bruck said Smith’s grief, remorse and memories while serving life behind bars would be torment enough.

“This young woman is in a lake of fire,” Bruck said. “That’s her punishment.”

Holding a Bible, Bruck read the story from the Gospel of John about a woman who committed adultery--an offense punishable by stoning to death.

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” Bruck read.

But Pope told jurors Smith’s remorse for killing her only children, 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex, was meaningless.

“She may be sorry--now,” he said, his voice rising. “But was she sorry when she dropped that hand brake down?”

The crowd that gathered in front of the courthouse to hear the verdict was split in their views of the case.

“She’s crying out for help. She just needs help. If they’d given Susan the death chair it wouldn’t bring those boys back,” said Christine Bird, 56.

Holly Tator, who was also in the crowd, said the death sentence would have been more just. “What she did was wrong and she planned it all along. She was pleading to the whole nation and lying all along.”

There was never any doubt about Smith’s guilt. Her trial, which began July 10, was to explore why she killed the boys Oct. 25 and how she would be punished.

Bruck argued during the trial that Smith snapped under unbearable personal pressures and mental illness. Smith’s father, Harry Vaughan, killed himself when she was 6 and defense lawyers said she also was prone to depression and had attempted suicide several times.

Pope told the jury Smith killed her sons so she could try to continue a relationship with a boyfriend. He was the son of the owner of the plant where she worked and once told her he wasn’t ready to be a father.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you, for Susan Smith, the love for herself was greater than her love for those boys,” Pope said.

The prosecution showed jurors a videotaped re-enactment of the crime in which it took Smith’s car six minutes to sink with the boys strapped inside.

A defense psychiatrist testified that after Smith left his wife in August, 1994, she became increasingly depressed.

Among them was her stepfather, Beverly Russell, who admitted molesting her when she was 16 and to having sexual relations with her as recently as August. On Thursday he took the witness stand and tearfully took partial responsibility for what happened to the boys.

Bruck said after the verdict that Smith still wants to die.

“I think Susan is still suicidal,” he said. “She still puts on a brave front. . . . But yes, underneath the exterior of ‘I’m all right,’ I think there’s great anguish and desire for relief from her pain.”