The Nation: The Long Wait

Today, more than eleven years after becoming a Death House resident, I am doing precisely what I began doing the very first day: waiting for a remote, faceless group of judges to decide what may be my final appeal.

Three years after Edgar Smith thus concluded his book Brief Against Death, his wait was over: last week a federal judge, considering the last of a score of legal moves, set aside his murder conviction. At 37, Smith—dropped-out genius, jailhouse lawyer, author, and the man currently living under a death sentence longer than any other American —finally won a new trial. His nearly 14 years in the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton had been a time of stubborn and brilliant resistance to capital punishment and of triumph over his own mistakes.

Smith dropped out of high school twice and then joined the Marines; when his hitch was up, he returned to drift from job to job in northern New Jersey. When the body of a 15-year-old high school student named Victoria Zielinski, from Ramsey, was found partially clothed, her head crushed, Smith was brought in for questioning. After a day of intensive interrogation—without legal counsel—he gave police an oral statement that the Bergen County prosecutor’s office claimed was an unsigned confession. Smith disavowed it during his trial, but he was convicted after less than two hours of jury deliberation.

During his long stay in the death house, he filed one appeal after another, including four to the Supreme Court, claiming that the statement had been coerced. Last week Judge John J. Gibbons agreed that Smith’s rights had been violated and overturned his conviction. Gibbons’ ruling precludes prosecution’s use of the statement and requires the state to set a new trial in motion within 60 days or set Smith free.

Renaissance. While imprisoned, Smith transformed himself from an unknown condemned man into a national figure. The onetime dropout honed his extremely high intelligence (IQ: 154) on college correspondence courses, legal texts and a renaissance sampling of books and periodicals. He also struck up a correspondence with Columnist William F. Buckley, who championed his cause in magazine and newspaper articles. Said Buckley of Smith last week: “His harrowing experience has made him wiser, and also a lot of others wiser—certainly myself.”

In 1968, Smith’s book Brief Against Death was published, followed a year later by a novel, A Reasonable Doubt. His moving account of the circumstances surrounding his case and his life in the death house attracted a sympathetic following. But always his energies were directed toward appealing his plight through the courts. After last week’s decision, the Bergen County prosecutors responsible for a new trial conceded the difficulty of gathering witnesses and evidence more than 14 years after the crime was committed. Smith is finally close to the freedom he sought so long from a cell on death row.