Boy’s Killer Seeks New Penalty Trial

Defense lawyers have asked for a new penalty trial for Gregory Scott Smith, convicted of raping and strangling an 8-year-old Northridge boy, on the grounds that a juror who recommended the death penalty concealed her bias against Smith before the trial.

The claim, filed Friday in Ventura County Superior Court, hinges on statements made during jury selection by one of the 12 jurors who recommended that a judge condemn Smith to be executed.

Smith is scheduled to be sentenced April 3 for the 1990 slaying of Paul Bailly. Smith pleaded guilty to charges that he kidnaped, raped and strangled Paul on March 23, 1990, and set his body afire.

Last autumn, as she was being chosen for the jury, a candidate wrote on a questionnaire that her daughter was raped at age 16.

According to the papers filed Friday, defense attorneys asked the woman whether the memory of her daughter’s rape would cause her discomfort while hearing a case such as Smith’s.

The woman answered, “No, because it was too completely different,” the papers said.

Neither Smith’s attorneys nor prosecutors moved to have the woman excluded from the jury, which deliberated less than eight hours before recommending Jan. 28 that Judge Steven Z. Perren sentence Smith to death.

In asking Perren for a new trial or a life sentence for Smith, Farley wrote last week, “It is impossible to determine whether she was intentionally attempting to conceal possible bias at the time, or whether her original assessment of the impact of that incident was correct.”

Farley’s argument also cited an article published in The Times in which, after the verdict, the juror told a reporter that the trial brought back bad memories about an incident involving her daughter, but declined to elaborate.

The juror should have told the court in mid-trial that testimony was stirring bad memories of her daughter’s ordeal, Farley wrote.

Farley also argued that Christopher Hatcher, an expert in child-abduction cases who never met Smith, was improperly allowed to give jurors his opinion that Smith fit the profile of a sexual sadist.

Farley further alleged that Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory D. Totten committed prosecutorial misconduct during his closing statements by telling jurors that Smith fit the profile Hatcher talked about.

Prosecutors are due to file responses by March 30.

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