UNION, S.C.As Susan Smith rocked gently back and forth at the defense table, her lawyers Tuesday began their battle to save her from the death penalty, depicting her as legally sane but deeply tormented on the night she drowned her two young sons.
July 18, 1995
She snapped and Michael and Alex are gone, said defense attorney Judy Clarke in her opening statement to the nine men and three women sitting in the creaky oak chairs of the jury box. Susan broke, where many of us might bend.
She was terribly upset from a stressful day, Clarke said. But there was no single motive for the murder, the defense acknowledged, and Susan Smith is not here to say to you in any technical or legal sense that she was insane.
Assistant prosecutor Keith Giese said Smith’s crime was coldly calculateda conscious decision to rid herself of her children so that she could re-establish a relationship with the son of a wealthy textile company owner. The boys were a stumbling block that Smith decided to remove by drowning them in a local lake, Giese told the jury.
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With Susan Smith, it was I, I, I,
see SMITH, page 5
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