Susan Smith wants another day in court
Solicitor says it may be 15 years too late
FEBRUARY 5, 2010 10:26 a.m. 
(6)
Michael Smith would have been 18 this year.
His brother Alexander 16.
Now 15 years after their mother was convicted of their murders, she wants a new trial. Sixteenth Circuit Solicitor Kevin Bracket says it may be too late.
The Union County mother was sentenced to life in prison in July 1995 after a jury convicted her.
Her boys drowned in John D. Long Lake the evening of Oct. 25, 1994, after she lowered the emergency brake on her 1990 Mazda Protégé and let it roll down a boat ramp into the water with the children still strapped in their car seats.
Afterward, she claimed she had been carjacked by a black man who drove away with her sons still in the car.
Smith, who is serving her sentence at the Leath Correctional Institute near Greenwood, filed on Jan. 19 with the Union County Clerk of Court a handwritten Application for Post-Conviction Relief . She asked that her life sentence be overturned, a new trial granted and that she be afforded parole eligibility every year.
In the filing, Smith alleges that during the investigation that led to her arrest in the fall of 1994, her Miranda rights were violated when she was questioned without legal counsel. In addition, she alleges prosecutorial misconduct on the part of former 16th Solicitor Tommy Pope for bringing a case to trial that she claims was based on an illegally obtain confession.
Smith is also claiming inadequate assistance of counsel on the part of her attorney, David Bruck, a former Columbia defense attorney who since 1976 has successfully defended scores of capital defendants and today serves as a clinical professor of law at Washington and Lee University and director of the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse.
In the PCR application, Smith claims her lawyer refused to allow her to plead guilty, forced her to have a jury trial, failed to instruct the jury on Battered Women’s Syndrome and denied her the right to appeal.
Bracket said South Carolina’s statute of limitation with regard to such a motion expires one year after a direct appeal has been rejected or one year from the conviction if no direct appeal is made, as are the circumstances with this case.
Smith’s filing in state court comes just over a month after her petition for habeas corpus relief in federal court was denied based on the fact all remedies in state court hadn’t been exhausted.
Attorneys for the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office are responsible for filing an answer to Smith’s petition. A spokesman for Attorney General Henry McMaster said Monday he could not discuss the material that will be included in the response to Smith’s PCR until it is filed.
That response is due 90 days from her filing, said Mark Plowden, communications director of the state Attorney General.
Smith’s mother, Linda Russell, said she wouldn’t be talking publicly about her daughter’s request for a new trial.
JANUARY 19, 2012 2:09 p.m. (3)
OCTOBER 10, 2011 11:28 a.m. (0)
APRIL 4, 2011 10:11 a.m. (0)
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