Jury Asked to Back Death for Boy’s Killer : Crime: Gregory Scott Smith is called a ‘predator.’ But the defense tells the panel that his life should be spared.

Gregory Scott Smith’s lawyer pleaded for his client’s life Thursday, and a prosecutor urged jurors to give him the death penalty for the rape and murder of an 8-year-old Northridge boy 22 months ago.

The attorneys’ impassioned closing arguments in Ventura County Superior Court followed two months of testimony in a case that authorities have called the most disturbing in recent memory.

Jurors must decide whether to recommend that Judge Steven Z. Perren order the death penalty or life imprisonment without parole for Smith, a thin, pale former day-care aide from Canoga Park.

Last October, Smith pleaded guilty to charges that he kidnaped, raped and strangled Paul Bailly and set his body afire near Simi Valley on March 23, 1990.

Smith sat unmoving, cheek on fist, as Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Totten called him “a human predator whose prey was a little 8-year-old boy, 4 feet, 2 inches tall, weighing only 50 pounds.”

Totten then attacked defense efforts to paint Smith, 23, as a brain-damaged, mentally retarded victim of poor parenting.

Totten told jurors that the evidence shows that Smith planned the killing months in advance, executed it with cold calculation and took sexual pleasure from watching Paul struggle in handcuffs and a duct-tape gag.

Smith probably raped the boy in his bedroom at the Smith home, although a plumber showed up to work on a room addition, Totten said.

Smith then drove Paul’s body to a brushy clearing 75 feet off Black Canyon Road near Simi Valley, opened the car’s trunk and hood, and draped a blanket over the license plate to make the car look as innocuous as possible, Totten said.

Smith then poured gasoline on the body, mostly on the face and genitals, set it on fire and fled, according to testimony that Totten recounted.

“He was sophisticated enough to know that he needed to destroy or hide the evidence,” Totten said.

He said Smith killed Paul to get revenge for complaints the boy made that eventually got him fired on March 6, 1990, from a day-care program for latchkey children at Darby Avenue Elementary School in Northridge.

But Totten said Smith had shown hostility to Paul for several months before killing him--such as asking the boy whether his clothes came from Goodwill, and twice tying him to a jungle gym at the school.

Finally, Totten ridiculed testimony by Smith’s family that he grew up a good-natured, slow-minded boy whose father cruelly ignored him.

“If the defendant was as generous and loving and as great a guy as (his mother) Sherron Smith and his sisters wanted to believe he was, we wouldn’t be here,” Totten told jurors.

He concluded, “This case . . . demands the most severe punishment we have.”

Defense attorney Willard Wiksell then began his argument, telling jurors that a life sentence without parole will be ample punishment for Smith.

“For me to offer excuses to you for this crime would be an insult to you and to the Bailly family,” Wiksell told jurors. “The question is, what is the proper punishment for somebody who’s mentally deficient?”

Mary Bailly, the victim’s mother, sat on the edge of her front-row seat during Wiksell’s statement, slowly tapping her foot.

Wiksell told jurors that there was no evidence that Smith enjoyed the crime, nor evidence that he is of average intelligence, as Totten had argued.

“Why is it necessary to paint Greg Smith as normal but slow, when you know as well as I do he’s got a screw loose?” Wiksell asked, pointing to his client. “Why is that important? Because they know it’s morally and fundamentally wrong to execute a mentally deficient person.”

As for Totten’s contention that Smith was working up to killing Paul by hurting other children, as testimony revealed, Wiksell scoffed, “That gives fiction a whole new meaning.”

Smith’s actions, such as hitting a referee’s shin with a hockey stick or throwing a ball at children who laughed at him, were incidents of poor judgment, which prosecutors cited to get jurors mad enough to recommend the death penalty, Wiksell said.

Finally, Wiksell said it was unfair for prosecutors to label Smith a predator based on the testimony of a psychiatric expert on child molestation, who had testified that Smith fit that psychological profile.

“It’s fundamentally unfair to put somebody in the gas chamber based on the fact that they fit a profile,” Wiksell said.

The death penalty should be reserved for career criminals, not someone such as Smith, who has no prior record, Wiksell said.

“He did an unspeakable act, and he deserves . . . to sit in a cage the rest of his life,” Wiksell said. “Life without possibility of parole . . . is the just verdict.”

Attorneys for each side plan to make another round of arguments today.