Jury Ponders Sentence for 8-Year-Old’s Killer

A jury began deliberations Friday afternoon over whether Gregory Scott Smith should be sentenced to death or life in prison for kidnaping, raping and strangling 8-year-old Paul Bailly and burning his body in 1990.

After listening to closing arguments by a prosecutor and Smith’s attorney, the jury of seven men and five women met for about 90 minutes, then adjourned until Tuesday.

Smith, a 23-year-old former day-care aide from Canoga Park, returned to his cell in the Ventura County Jail, where he has been held since the week of March 23, 1990, when Paul’s bound, burned body was found amid a brush fire near Simi Valley. Earlier, attorneys for each side gave the jury differing views of “the real Greg Smith.”

While Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter D. Kossoris said Smith fit one expert witness’s profile of a sexually sadistic murderer and should be put to death, defense attorney James M. Farley described him as a brain-damaged child who should be allowed to die in prison.

Kossoris ridiculed defense experts’ diagnosis that Smith suffered from mental retardation and brain damage, and he recalled IQ tests showing Smith has average intelligence.

Kossoris also reminded the jury of witnesses’ testimony that Smith molested other little boys, once locking himself into a teachers’ restroom with a 5-year-old boy.

Kossoris recounted testimony that Smith has a “vendetta personality” that surfaced in childhood and later, when he worked with Paul and other latchkey children at Darby Avenue Elementary School in Northridge.

One aide testified that Smith vowed “he was gonna get Paul” for complaining that Smith treated him harshly, Kossoris recalled. Such complaints led school officials to fire Smith, just three weeks before he abducted Paul and murdered him.

“When you think of that last day for Paul, he’s happy, skipping down the street . . . he doesn’t have a care in the world,” Kossoris said.

“Greg sees him, he abducts him, he does all the things you’ve heard about,” he said. “He gags him, he handcuffs him, he sodomizes him in an extremely painful way. And if that isn’t enough, he strangles him to death . . . and he burns him.”

Smith drove his car through a carwash, then to his sister’s house, where he complained that he had hurt his back in a fall to provide an alibi for scratches Paul gave him during the attack, Kossoris said.

“This meanness, his callousness, his cruelness is there from beginning to end--that’s the real Greg Smith,” Kossoris said.

“Ask yourselves, is it a fair punishment for him to spend the rest of his life in prison, maybe 50 years, after depriving Paul of his life, after depriving his mother of her only son?” Kossoris said. “If this isn’t a crime that deserves the death penalty, what crime could there ever be that would? . . . Greg Smith deserves it.”

Then Farley, Smith’s court-appointed attorney, began a 90-minute closing statement that left Smith and his two sisters in tears.

“His immaturity, his childishness, the fact that he is emotionally crippled, the fact that he cannot relate to his peers, the fact that he acts like a mean kid is no excuse for what he did,” Farley said. “But . . . he is a human being and he should be treated like a human being.”

Farley recalled school reports that Smith often fought with other children, and testimony that his only friend other than a schoolmate with whom he had homosexual relations, was his dog, Blue.

Then Farley showed jurors sketches of a cartoon hound that Smith had drawn in blue ink, titled “Going to the pet store.”

Farley urged jurors to recommend that the judge sentence Smith to spend the rest of his life in the confines of a prison cell, where everything he does will be controlled by someone else.

“The damn thing never should have happened . . . all the pain that was caused,” said Farley, adding that a death sentence would bring lasting pain to Smith’s family.

“When do we stop the killing of people and the pain being put on the survivors?” Farley said, pounding the courtroom podium with his fist. “Punish him, but don’t kill him. Put him in that place for the rest of his life, but don’t order his execution. Don’t feed the death machine another death. Society will be protected.”