Smith Is Convicted of Murder in Sons’ Deaths : Verdict: Jury deliberates 2 1/2 hours, rejects involuntary manslaughter. On Monday, it will weigh death penalty.

A jury brushed aside contentions of mental illness Saturday and found a 23-year-old South Carolina woman guilty of first-degree murder in the drowning deaths of her two sons.

The jury reached the verdict after 2 1/2 hours of deliberations, rejecting the defense’s contentions that Susan Smith was depressed and suicidal on the night of the deaths and did not intend to kill her sons, Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months, who died while strapped into their car seats.

The three-woman, nine-man sequestered jury on Monday will begin to consider whether to sentence Smith to life in prison or death in the electric chair.

“The verdict was no surprise,” defense attorney David Bruck said outside the courtroom in Union, S.C. “This is a very difficult case; it’s a heartbreaking case. It’s a terrible tragedy.”

Because of testimony introduced about Smith’s emotional state, Circuit Judge William Howard agreed Saturday to a surprise motion from Bruck to allow the jury to consider the option of finding Smith guilty of involuntary manslaughter, which in this case would have carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

But Bruck, noting that the laws defining murder in South Carolina are “very broad,” said he was never hopeful about a manslaughter verdict. “That was never anything that anyone ever expected,” he said.

Smith slouched forward when the verdict was read and appeared to weep. Bruck put his arm around her. She has been taking medication for depression and has been kept under suicide watch in jail. Before the start of her trial, a psychiatrist testified that she might even attempt to sabotage her defense if she were allowed to testify. She was not called to testify.

The case, which was wrapped up after less than a week of testimony, bristled with tales of sexual abuse, infidelity, suicide attempts--and murder. Testimony in the case lifted a veil on a seamy side of life in the small, God-fearing town of Union that, from outward appearances, was as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting.

Smith confessed Nov. 3 to letting her car roll into a lake with her two sons inside. For nine days before her confession, she had insisted to authorities and in tearful pleas on national television that a black man had abducted them and stolen her car.

News of her deception inflamed the community. Many of her neighbors publicly called for her execution. But as revelations of Smith’s troubled past began to leak out, the local mood seemed to change.

By the start of her trial, her two suicide attempts were common knowledge, as was the fact that her father had killed himself when she was 6 and that her stepfather had admitted to molesting her when she was 15. Suddenly, many of those who earlier had said she should be put to death were saying she needed prayer--not punishment.

“Evilness had nothing to do with this,” defense attorney Judy Clarke said in her closing argument to the jury Saturday. “Mental illness, mental disorder, whatever you want to call it, had everything to do with it. . . . This is not a case about evil. This is a case about despair and sadness.”

Prosecutor Tommy Pope portrayed the drownings as malicious murder. “On the night of Oct. 25, Susan Smith made a horrible, horrible choice,” he told the jury. “That particular night, ladies and gentlemen, she made a choice as an adult, a conscious choice that she would end the lives of those boys.”

In the end, the jury appeared to have sided with Pope.

According to testimony during the trial, Smith, in the months leading up to the drownings, had entered into a series of sexual relationships in a futile attempt to ease her emotional distress. She had slept with her stepfather, a locally respected leader in the state Republican Party and the Christian Coalition; with J. Cary Findlay, owner of the mill where Smith worked as a secretary; with Findlay’s 28-year-old son Tom, and also with David Smith, her estranged husband.

Prosecutors contended she killed her sons because she was in love with Tom Findlay, who did not want the responsibility of children. Tom Findlay broke up with Smith a week before the drownings. He had written a letter saying he did not want children.

But an expert witness for the defense, Seymour Halleck, a psychiatrist and law professor at the University of North Carolina, testified that Smith had planned to kill herself when she drove to John D. Long Lake outside of town. Halleck said she was not insane and that she knew what she was doing was wrong, but he said she suffered from a serious depressive disorder.

In his request to the judge that the jury be allowed to consider a manslaughter verdict, Bruck argued that Smith did not intend to kill her children.

Contending that Smith was emotionally disturbed and suicidal, he said jurors should be permitted to weigh whether, at the moment she jumped out of her car and allowed it to roll into the lake, “she no longer intended to kill anybody but reacted and acted in a reckless fashion”--to which the involuntary manslaughter law would apply.

The judge agreed with Bruck, over the objections of prosecutors. But in the end, it made little difference.

In the second phase of Smith’s murder trial, jurors will consider her penalty by hearing fresh testimony and evidence from both sides. Prosecutors will seek to present aggravating circumstances to bolster their bid for the death penalty; her defense will argue that mitigating factors warrant life imprisonment.

In testimony Saturday, Jenny Ward, a state Department of Social Services official, said she investigated a report that Smith was molested by her stepfather, Beverly Russell, in March, 1988, when she was 16. She said the family was already in a therapy program for similar incidents that occurred a year before.

“She was very scared,” Ward said. “She was very anxious. . . . She only wanted the sexual abuse to stop.” Although Russell admitted the molestation, he was not charged.

In earlier testimony Saturday, Smith’s 22-year-old cousin, Leigh Harrison, a witness for the defense, called Smith a loving mother. While she said that she was worried about the two suicide attempts, she added, “Susan did cover it up very well. . . . She hid her pain very well.”

Under cross-examination, she acknowledged that not only would she have cared for the children if Smith could not, but “anybody in the family would have.”

The jury deliberated more than two hours to reach its verdict. After about 35 minutes of deliberation, it asked to see two television interviews with Smith, including one where she pleaded for help from the public to find her boys.

In this small community, where everyone seems to know everyone else, a number of jurors had links to the case. Among the jurors was the wife of the Union police chief who briefly baby-sat Smith when she was a child, a man who worked with Smith’s father-in-law at Wal-Mart and a man whose son was treated by a doctor who was a defense witness. It was determined that they would all be able to render a fair verdict.

The judge dismissed one juror just before deliberations began, however, saying he had an undisclosed family tie to the case.