Verdict Is In On `Maximum Moira' -- Smith Prosecutor Gets The Blame

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - After eight months of taking depositions in the William Kennedy Smith rape case, and after a grueling 11-day trial during which she had interrogated 37 witnesses, and after a draining 72-minute summation for the jury, the long nightmare was over for prosecutor Moira Lasch.

She was gathering her papers after the acquittal when she turned to see her husband, Alan, and for the first time she was caught, by the courtroom camera, smiling.

He put his arm around her. His lips brushed her hair, and she took out a tissue and dabbed at her eyes.

The Ice Princess, at long last, had melted.

For days, Moira Lasch, 40, had been pilloried by lawyers and lay people alike for an ineffective prosecution. Still, by general agreement, her summation had been her finest hour of the 90 that she had labored in the fourth-floor courtroom, trying to send to prison a son from the nearest thing the United States has to a royal family.

But Smith was not the only person on trial here.

Because of the keen interest in the case, and because the trial was broadcast nationally, Moira Lasch was on trial herself, and not only before her peers, but before millions of Americans who followed the trial and for days talked of little else.

The Smith case is extra delicate in Palm Beach. Seven years ago, when David Kennedy died of a drug overdose at a luxurious hotel, Palm Beach County State Attorney David Bludworth was accused of coddling the Kennedy family. Facing election next year, he chose the unusual procedure this time of circumventing the grand jury and filing charges directly against Smith. Then he appointed his best prosecutor - Lasch.

In the history of U.S. jurisprudence, no lawyer has ever been more widely watched, more thoroughly scrutinized and more eagerly second-guessed. The judgment by many people is that they dislike Lasch for her manner and her monotone, and they blame her for having lost the case against Smith.

A FEW COLD EXAMPLES

Examples of her coldness abound.

When Florence Orbach, the 78-year-old grandmother with salty observations about the Kennedys and their sex lives, was interviewed as a prospective juror and then dismissed, she walked by Lasch and said, "Smile. You'll look pretty."

In a deposition, the woman who claimed to have been raped was flabbergasted by Lasch.

"I was quite confused in the beginning," she said, "and learning how to - learning about Mrs. Lasch's personality, I was perplexed in the beginning."

People were perplexed at the end, too.

Smith's attorney, Roy Black, told a reporter for the Palm Beach Post that Lasch "is more of a Mack truck than a Mercedes. She and I are not friends at all. In fact, we don't even talk. But I admire her skills as a prosecutor. She did the best she could with what she had."

As the first victim from the legal community to bomb on television, Lasch will be remembered throughout her career as the woman who blew the Smith case. Her reputation as a tough and effective prosecutor is a media myth, according to F. Lee Bailey, the fabled former Boston attorney who is now a commentator on the Courtroom Television Network.

He had just returned to his office during the trial from yet another TV appearance when he took off his jacket, sat down, propped his boots on his desk, loosened his tie and let loose on the subject of Moira Lasch.

"I have never heard a single lawyer say she's any good," said Bailey. "Willie Smith's story was plausible, but Moira Lasch was unable to poke a hole in it because she's a totally incompetent woman. It was the press that created Moira Lasch. People down here who have been covering her for years knew that she was never any good, but then, suddenly, we're reading in The New York Times that she has a great reputation. Not among lawyers, she doesn't."

Bailey adjusted the volume on his TV set to listen to Smith's testimony, and groaned at Lasch's ineffective effort to break him down.

"I've never seen a performance like this," Bailey said. "This is gross."

He was asked: Has she done anything right?

"Not anything that I wouldn't expect one of my trainees who had passed the bar to do better in the first six months," he said. "I don't think she's had any training at all. . . . She doesn't comprehend what a proper question is. She stands up there and argues. She's shrill. She's got a terrible personality."

From the TV set, in answer to Smith's testimony that he had had two orgasms in the company of the Jupiter, Fla., woman that night at the Kennedy estate, Lasch asked, "So what are you, a sex machine?"

"And," continued Bailey, "apparently she's never met a man who can (reach orgasm) twice in a half hour."

Not everyone was so harsh.

A few hours after the verdict, David Roth, attorney for the Jupiter woman, took some of the heat off Lasch.

"It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but I've been a lawyer here for 22 years, and I genuinely believe she did the best job she could."

Lasch's troubles began the first day. Her interrogation of her own key witness, Anne Mercer, was boring - a monotone vs. a monotone.

Lasch created confusion by calling as a prosecution witness Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who would seem to be a witness for the defense.

NO CLARENCE DARROW

With a voice that is unfortunately high-pitched, Lasch is no Clarence Darrow. She speaks in a monotone, and when she does emphasize a word, she does it arrhythmically and without passion, so that "He went after her and tackled her" is said with the same emotion as "Pass the sugar."

Her Jimmy Carter personality - an excessive focus on technical details at the expense of larger questions - undoubtedly came across as tedious to the jurors.

Lasch's interrogations seemed designed more to satisfy a checklist of tiny items that proved, in the end, to be a waste of effort.

At times, her garbled syntax left witnesses mystified as to what she was asking, and some questions were so simplistic as to have been uttered only because she had no idea what else to say: "Now, asking someone to drive you home is a way of getting them to your place, right?"

So, who is Moira Lasch, anyway?

Named for the actress and dancer Moira Shearer, she grew up in suburban Maryland, the daughter of a physician and a homemaker. She graduated magna cum laude from Vassar, obtained a master's degree in art history from Boston University and a law degree from the University of Maryland. After that she became an assistant Palm Beach County attorney in 1978 and assistant state attorney a year later.

Although she has not talked to the press in nine months, arranged for her telephone number to be unlisted, expunged her address from public records and instructed her colleges not to reveal information about her, interviews with courtroom regulars and newspaper articles supply a profile of her.

A career prosecutor who earns $66,500 directing 30 attorneys in the felony division of the state attorney's office, she has worked full time on the Smith case since April.

Married to a dentist - the couple has no children - she is said to be very concerned about her teeth, attends public meetings on fluoridating the county's water and is seen occasionally, during recesses, brushing her teeth in the washroom.

She's a 9-to-5 woman, but not in the customary sense. She goes to bed at 9 and gets up at 5, often works weekends and, for exercise, favors aerobics and Stairmaster. She's a vegetarian with a taste for sweets, especially M&Ms. She likes to bicycle in New England and hike the Grand Canyon. She sometimes eats at her desk amid autopsy photographs.

Fellow lawyers describe her as organized, unrelenting, hard-working, moralistic and cold.

`MAXIMUM MOIRA'

Known as "Maximum Moira" because she presses for the most severe sentences, she used to keep on her desk a miniature electric chair, complete with head plate.

As a young woman, she has said, she was so well behaved it was sickening, and her idea of fun was to read a French dictionary.

In 1987, she was named prosecutor of the year for having helped send to prison three men involved in the well-publicized murder of an assistant city manager of Palm Beach.

At the time, a myth grew about her.

One day, a rival lawyer shook his fist under her nose and threatened to deck her. Another time, a man she helped convict for plotting the murder of his wife spent $5,000 on a plot to escape prison so he could murder her.

She once was spit upon by a man charged with rape, and the next day, she wore a raincoat to court. When another rape suspect called her a pointy-nosed honky white bitch, she retorted, "I don't have a pointy nose."