A Murder Revisited

Interesting story by my old colleague Alex Rose in today's Daily Times about the failed appeal of convicted murderer and death row inmate Wayne Smith.

These paragraphs jumped out at me:

During the initial trial, the prosecution claimed Smith killed Jones, a pregnant mother of two, after she rejected his sexual advances. Smith claimed that he made an arrangement with Jones to trade sex for cocaine. 

Smith told police that the two wrestled on the ground and he feared Jones, who is white, would claim that he had raped her. Smith said he did not believe a jury would believe him because he is black, so he instead choked Jones and put her body in the creek.

So fearing he would be falsely accused of rape, Smith admits to murdering Jones instead. Sounds reasonable.

What it doesn't sound like is a death penalty case. Until you read the part about Smith having done time for killing someone else earlier in his life. Yes, a previous murder can count as an aggravating factor in the sentencing of a convicted killer.

Smith got a second trial a couple of years ago on his death sentence. A Delaware County jury upheld the sentence leading the prosecutor to remark back then...

"The jury appropriately determined that the defendant's prior conviction for voluntary manslaughter of a bar patron with a machete, a commonwealth aggravating factor, outweighed any mitigating factor presented by the defense."

A machete?

The defense raised mitigating factors like the abuse he suffered as a kid at the hands of his abusive father and the lack of Snickers in the household.



Okay, that was tasteless.

No doubt, Smith grew up in a very un-Brady Bunch kind of home. Everyone in this awful story deserves some measure of sympathy, which is not to say the killer doesn't also deserve the death penalty.