Susan Smith: Innocent Or Guilty Through Insanity?

It was inevitable that defense attorneys would establish mental illness as a defense for Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother charged with drowning her two young sons last summer.

On the same day prosecutors were re-enacting the drowning by sending Smith's 1990 Mazda Protege back into the dark and murky waters of John D. Long Lake, state psychiatrists determined that Smith suffers a mental disability - severe depression - that could have contributed to her killing her children.

She's sane now, her evaluators said, but she might have been depressed the night she left her boys strapped into their car seats and let her car slide down the boat ramp.

Now that's the sort of information that consoles the spirit. Smith was depressed. Well, gee, anyone can understand that sort of thing. Who wouldn't kill their children?

Meanwhile, back at John D. Long Lake, where spectators still cruise the shores trying to imagine the deed, prosecutors and sheriff's deputies last week tied sand bags simulating the Smith boys' weights into two car seats and watched to see how long it took the car to sink.

Gratification for millions

For the gratification of the millions who can't get enough of this sort of thing, it took six seconds for the car to reach the water's edge. It took another six minutes for the vehicle to disappear beneath the dark and murky waters of the lake.

Stay tuned for further lurid details sure to come your way, thanks to two network news teams that filmed the event from shore and four media helicopters and an airplane that circled overhead.

Meanwhile, back at the state hospital, psychiatric experts are analyzing, critiquing, calculating and hyperventilating over their evaluations to determine whether the lovely Ms. Smith, voted perkiest by her high school class, is crazy or just a killer.

Is Smith, who confessed to the crime, guilty by reason of insanity? Is she guilty but mentally ill? Is she innocent by reason of insanity? Is she insane but mentally ill? Or innocent but insanely guilty?

Or are we all just nuts? Hear, hear. Hang us all.

But, seriously, folks, one can easily imagine that Smith is depressed, was depressed, will always be depressed. Her boyfriend dumped her; her husband, who managed a grocery store, could never provide her with the lifestyle promised by her paramour, the young textile heir who, by the way, said he wasn't ready for the responsibility of two young children. Where's a good gingerbread house when you need it?

And then there's the sexual molestation at the hands of her stepfather during her tender years. Doubtless Smith's attorneys celebrated the day they discovered records of that childhood incident, otherwise Smith would be just guilty as sin.

Don't get me wrong. Nobody's making light of clinical depression, which is as real as Prozac. And nobody's making light of sexual molestation, the horror of which needs no elaboration.

Who isn't mentally ill?

But haven't we gone too far in ascribing criminal activity to childhood trauma and mental illness? Who isn't mentally ill? Who isn't depressed from time to time, even clinically? Who didn't have a childhood trauma or two?

We can't kill people because we're having a bad day, and we can't excuse killing because the murderers have had a bad life. It's just that simple.

The Menendez boys, who blew their parents to smithereens while they watched television, may have hated their parents for good reason. But they could have left home and gotten a life.

I'll bet you anything Charles Manson had a bad childhood. Too bad he came along before the lousy-childhood defense became our national mantra.

In 1995, he might have gotten a little sympathy: Charley, baby, we know you wouldn't have slashed Sharon Tate's house party into human confetti if your mama had been more responsive when you woke up crying in the night.

Meanwhile, back at the lake, the spirits of two little boys haunt the town of Union, S.C. Maybe it's best the boys went to rest that night. Who knows? They might have grown up depressed, and God knows what they might have done.

(Copyright 1995, Tribune Media Services Inc.)

Kathleen Parker welcomes your views and suggestions. Write to her in care of this newspaper, or contact her by e-mail at kparker@aol.com