The most famous criminal defense lawyers in America admit that because of our system of safeguarding the rights of the accused, they don’t often get a chance to defend clients who are “innocent” in the sense that the public defines innocence. If they’re going to make a living in criminal defense they have to be content with making the best of a client’s story and protecting his rights despite what they might personally believe.
In law school they’re told that they can have a satisfying career doing just that, and on the rare occasions when they believe in their hearts that they do have an innocent criminal client they can permit a bit of personal passion.
But the vast majority of lawyers are the products of middle-class American society that grew up on Perry Mason, and they aren’t satisfied with the caveats of law school. They need to believe in innocence.
The defense had to make a decision whether to call Jay Smith as a witness, but Dr. Jay told Josh Lock that he refused to “proffer.” That is, Jay Smith said that he’d testify if subpoenaed, but as to what that testimony would be they’d have to wait and see.
It was too unpredictable and dangerous. Lock did not subpoena the prince of darkness.
The closing arguments took place on October 28th. Josh Lock was first. After his opening remarks he said, “At the beginning of the trial I suggested that you would be presented with a facade, an appearance, an illusion of wrongdoing. The question is whether the facade is a real structure or merely an illusion.”
He began with a summation of his attack on the pathologist, who was not a forensic pathologist in the first place, and used his impressive knowledge of all forensics. He said that the actual anoxia, or oxygen starvation, could not have taken place before Sunday afternoon, when his client had already been at the beach for many hours.
He hit hard on the fact that no one had ever seen Bill Bradfield in a romantic moment with the murder victim. He pointed out that there was evidence that Susan Reinert had dated a couple of other people, and she probably had sexual relations with one of them in her home. He suggested that Susan Reinert was a bit schizoid, and had fantasized the unrequited love affair with Bill Bradfield. He said that there was no evidence that Susan Reinert had made adequate preparations to go to Europe so even that could have been her fantasy.
He suggested that not only “Alex,” whoever he was, but even Sue Myers could have drawn Susan Reinert from her home that night by calling her and repeating some of the old threats. Sedate Sue was in it again.
He pointed out that a car very similar to Susan Reinerts had been seen parked at Jay Smiths house in the spring of 1979, and it was not too farfetched to think that she may have been seeing Dr. Jay on the sly. He didn’t dispute the hair on Dr. Jay’s floor, but pointed out again that since the root was intact it had not been pulled out but had fallen out. And who knew what they were doing down there.
He said that convicts like Proctor Nowell were not to be believed.
He did what he’d planned to do all along; gave the jury other possibilities to explain-and he had to use the word-the “bizarre” circumstances surrounding this case.
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It was during Rick Guida’s closing that Josh Lock decided that Guida, though irritating and egocentric, was the best prosecutor he’d ever seen.
Guida began by telling the jury that the complex part of their job would be in fitting together the facts. He said that the most important tool at their disposal would be common sense. He told them that was what he’d looked for in selecting them, and he came back to it again and again: use your common sense.
In jury cases involving circumstantial evidence, prosecutors often use metaphors such as “weight and counterweights.” The presumption of innocence weighs a lot; the circumstantial evidence weighs little until you start tossing each little chunk onto the scale. Guida used “pebbles on the pile.”
There were the forensics: the comb, the fibers, the hair in Jay Smith’s basement, all pebbles onto the pile. The methods of taping and chaining and injecting morphine were more pebbles. There was the insurance that Bill Bradfield didn’t want and had never expected, but nevertheless sued for.
There was the filing-off of gun serial numbers, and Guida implied that the gun was to be the murder weapon and that’s the only sensible reason why Bill Bradfield wanted the numbers removed, but Chris Pappas had botched that job.
The dildo under the seat, he said, was to implicate nonexistent Alex, and tied in nicely with Bill Bradfield deciding three days after the murder that Jay Smith couldn’t have done it after all.
Halfway through, he said, “Mister Lock believes that the crime scene does not point to the defendant. At the end of this argument, I’m going to show you the circumstances point to no one else in the entire world.”
All the business with the cash withdrawals and calling her brother to take part in the “investment,” and the missing ring that was to be reset for the wedding, all added pebbles.
Then he got to the money wiping.
“What happened to the bills?” he asked. “What did Chris Pappas tell you? When they were in the attic, Bill Bradfield said they’d better wipe fingerprints off the money. Why? Who wipes fingerprints off money? Is it because Susan Reinerts fingerprints were on the money? Are any of these actions of an innocent man?”
He went to the quickie divorce which he attributed to greed, since Bill Bradfield was about to come into money. He proceeded to the weekend at Cape May where Bill Bradfield had assembled all the players and said that Susan Reinert might die, and just by coincidence she did.
When he went back to the crime scene, he said it was the biggest circumstance of all.
“Bradfield said that two people could have killed Susan Reinert,” he said. “Jay C. Smith because she had an affair with him and was interfering with his alibi testimony, or a crazy man named Alex who was having kinky sex with her. Why is this so important? It wouldn’t be if Susan Reinert had been the only one killed, but it is important because her children were with her and they were not found in the car. What were the children worth to this defendant as opposed to the rest of the six billion people in the world? Who benefits from this scenario? Why weren’t the three of them in the car? Or in the alternative, if you’re talking about Smith, why isn’t Susan Reinert in the same place with her children who have never been found?
“Whoever did this, whoever helped in the commission of this crime, was savvy enough to make sure that those children’s bodies would never be found, but he took the awful chance of driving a dead body all the way to Harrisburg and parking it in a public parking lot, and walked around behind that car and opened the hatch for the world to see the exposed body of Susan Reinert, and then pirouetted and walked away.
“Does Jay C. Smith benefit from that according to the way Bradfield has explained the situation? Of course not. If he’d killed Susan Reinert because she was his mistress or interfering with his alibi, her body would be in the same hole with the children. What if Alex had done it? Would he transport her to the Host Inn and expose her body to the world?
“Do you know why the body was exposed? Because this body is worth to one person in the world seven thousand dollars a pound, and it had to be found during the alibi weekend so that he can say to the world, ‘I couldn’t possibly have done it.’