NO CASTING OF STONES

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

For the past three weeks in Union, South Carolina, each day dawned blistering and dry and ended sticky. But just as word swept through court last Friday afternoon that the jury was about to come back with its sentence in the Susan Smith case, rain began to fall. And as Smith stood before the judge to learn she had been spared the death penalty, thunder rumbled. Courtroom spectators moved their gaze from defendant to windows and back again. Then, as swiftly as it had begun, the storm was over. A few minutes later, when Smith was led back to prison, the sun burst forth.

Catharsis has come to Union. Perhaps, as her lawyers contended, the jurors decided that Smith has suffered, and will continue to suffer, enough. Perhaps defense attorney David Bruck's final biblical admonishment--"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"--echoed in their ears. Or perhaps they simply reached the cold understanding that killing Smith would not bring those two little boys back to life. Perhaps the jurors could not erase their memories of testimony about Smith as a child and as a sunny young mother on the streets of their small town.

In the 2-1/2 hours it took them to reach the unanimous decision for life imprisonment, the nine men and three women must have remembered that Smith is also one of Union's own. "She had the home-court advantage," says I.S. Leevy Johnson, a criminal-defense lawyer from Columbia, South Carolina. "When a jury votes for the death penalty, it's usually for a stranger, a monster, a threat to society. It was almost impossible for the prosecutor to show she was any of that." After the sentencing, jurors reportedly asked Judge William Howard if Smith would receive psychiatric help in prison.

Even prosecutor Tommy Pope, who pressed for the death penalty, said he believed justice had been served. But not everyone agreed. "Why don't they just open the doors of the prison and let them all walk?" asked Judy McKinney of Williamston, South Carolina, who watched most of the trial. "She left those kids hanging upside down in that water for nine days. What's more deserving of the death penalty than that?" Still, as Johnson explains, "what you have to remember is death-penalty cases never turn on legal, technical arguments. They turn on emotions, attitudes."

Both prosecution and defense had tried to play on the jury's emotions. Pope brought in law-enforcement agents who testified to Smith's "strange and inappropriate" behavior during the nine-day search for her children. Eddie Harris, who transported Smith to interrogations during that period, testified that Smith said she was looking forward to going to the beach and learning how to dance the shag. Sandra Conradi, the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsies on Michael and Alex, described death by drowning in excruciating detail. And while jurors were spared the autopsy photos, they did view videotaped re-enactments of Smith's Mazda rolling into John D. Long Lake. In one shot by a camera mounted in the backseat of the car, jurors were able to see approximately what Michael and Alex saw in their final six minutes of life--water rising inexorably higher inside the car.

However, it was the testimony of David Smith, 25, about the loss of his sons that elicited such grief that Howard called a recess to allow people to dry their tears. "Everything I'd planned," David said, "teaching them to play ball, taking them fishing, teaching them to ride a bike, watching them go to school that first day, watching them grow up--all that has been ripped from me, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it." Sitting at the defense table, Susan shook with sobs, and three jurors wept. When Susan was escorted from the court for the lunch break, as she passed the witness stand where David still sat crying, she whispered, "I'm sorry, David."

But the jurors could also grieve for Susan Smith. The defense argued that she snapped after a long history of depression, suicide attempts, abuse and abandonment. Her brother Scotty Vaughan cried as he described how their father had shot himself when Susan was just six. "The Susan I know wouldn't have made a decision to harm Michael and Alex," he said. "The Susan I know was never at the lake that night." And there was also testimony on Smith's behalf from her stepfather Beverly Russell, a formerly upstanding citizen of Union who has admitted to molesting her as a teenager and continuing sexual relations until just months before the murders. Reading a letter he sent to her on Father's Day, he said, "I must tell you how sorry I am for letting you down as a father ... All you needed from me was the right kind of love. You don't have all the guilt in this tragedy."

Smith will serve time at the Women's Correctional Institution outside Columbia; for now she remains in isolation on a suicide watch. Though she will be eligible for parole in 30 years, she is unlikely ever to be released. And David Smith, who expressed disappointment about the verdict, is contemplating leaving Union. "I will never forget what Susan did," he said, "and forgiving is something I've got to deal with down the road." The people of Union too will never forget, but the process of forgiveness may have already begun.

--Reported by Lisa H. Towle/Union

With reporting by Lisa H. Towle/Union