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MR. GIESE: If it please the court, Your Honor.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my name is
Keith Giese and I have introduced myself before.
I'm with the solicitor's office on this case. There
is Tommy Pope, who is the solicitor.

Ladies and gentlemen our case basically is
this. For nine days in the fall of 1994 Susan Smith
looked this country in the eye and lied. She begged
her alleged carjacker for the safe return of her
children. She begged the country to help her find
her children. She told us that she begged her god
to bring her children back to her safely. And the
whole time, this whole time, she knew that they were
laying dead in the bottom of John D. Long Lake. And
we have charged her with two counts of murder.

As the judge read to you, these are the
indictments. They are not evidence. These are the
charging documents by which we are charging Susan
Smith with murder. They are very short. I'm going
to review them for you. That Susan Smith did in
Union County, on or about October 25, 1994,
feloniously, willfully, and with malice aforethought
kill one Michael Daniel Smith by means of drowning,
and said victim died as a result thereof.

That Susan Smith did in Union County, on or
about October 25th, 1994, feloniously, willfully,
and with malice aforethought kill one Alexander
Tyler Smith by means of drowning, and said victim
died as a result thereof.

Ladies and gentlemen, before I get into the
opening, I want to thank y'all for serving on this
jury. It is often said that serving on a jury is
the highest duty that you can perform for your
country other than serving in the military in a time
of war. So I want to tell you on behalf of the
State we realize the imposition this is on y'all.
It's not something that we take for granted. We do
appreciate it, and we hope that you recognize also
that it is something very important.

A few legal terms I would like to go through.
The first one is murder itself. The unlawful
killing of another human being with malice
aforethought.

 Malice is a legal term. There are a lot of
different definitions for them. To have murder you
must have malice. It's been defined as a
wickedness, an evilness of the heart, a heart devoid
of social duty. All the different names for it, it
really comes down to one thing. That is a
wrongfulness, a wrongfulness, an evilness, a
wickedness.

Now, you must have malice aforethought before
the fatal act. Malice aforethought of the fatal
act. Now, aforethought does not have to mean you
have to plan it out weeks or months in advance or
lay in wait for somebody. Malice aforethought, if
it exists this long before the fatal act, that is
malice aforethought. I don't think that you have to
have some well laid out plan premeditated for weeks
or months. If you got malice, if you have got that
evilness at any time before the fatal act, and that
is malice, it is aforethought.

Now, the judge touched briefly on some other
terms. First one is the presumption of innocence.
Ms. Smith is presumed innocent. That's part of our
system. She's presumed innocent as she sits there.
The State has the burden of proving Ms. Smith is
guilty. We have the burden of overcoming that
presumption of innocence. The State has the burden.
We gladly bear that burden. And we intend to meet
that burden in this trial.

Now, we have to prove our case beyond a
reasonable doubt. Now, reasonable doubt is often
defined as a doubt that would cause a reasonable
person to hesitate to act. Now, don't confuse
wanting to listen and be careful and think before
you make up your mind. That's not a hesitation to
act. That's just being careful. That's just being
cautious. That's just thinking before you act. A
reasonable doubt, a doubt that would cause a
reasonable person to hesitate to act. Don't confuse
that with just wanting to take your time in this
case.

Ladies and gentlemen, the way that Mr. Pope and
I intend to present our case to you is to start back
at the beginning, at October 25th, 1994, and
recreate the nine days that everybody lived through.
We are going to start at the very beginning with
Shirley McCloud, who was the woman whose house Ms.
Smith ran up to frantic the night of October 25th
reporting that a black male in a toboggan had
carjacked her at an intersection in Monarch, stuck a
gun in her ribs, made her drive near John D. Long
Lake, stop, get out of the car, and he drove off
with her children. That's the story she started out
with on the 25th of October. We are going to start
there with Ms. McCloud.

Then we are going to go through the
investigation as it unfolded. You are going to hear
from Mr. Roy Paschal of  SLED. He's a composite
artist. That's who Ms. Smith was sent to to draw --
to describe for him this black man in the toboggan,
so they could get a composite of this man that
supposedly kidnapped her children. We will have
that composite for you.

We will have the different people, the
different SLED agents, and other officers that
interviewed her at the beginning of the nine days in
the first couple of days trying to find out what was
going on, get some more clues, get some more facts.

We will tell you about the dual investigation
that got launched looking for the black man in the
toboggan. That's the only thing the police had to
go on. But then the suspicion was going towards Ms.
Smith too.

Now, starting October 29th, 1994, a SLED agent
was sent from Columbia to begin a series of
interviews with Ms. Smith. His name is Pete Logan.
Now, during the next several days Mr. Logan met with
Ms. Smith with a series of interviews, got
background information. He kept asking her about
what happened the night of the carjacking, and
slowly her story began to unravel.

Now, the first place that unraveled was the
intersection where Ms. Smith claimed that she got
carjacked. That intersection turned out that it's
on an eleven second delay cycle. And the only way
that it can be tripped is if a car trips it. So
from that, they knew it couldn't quite have
happened. Somebody would have had to have seen it
if it would have happened at that intersection.
They confronted Ms. Smith with that information.
She changed her story. She changed it and said that
now that it happened in Carlisle.

They got closer towards the 3rd of November.
The interviews continued. They confronted her again
on the location of the carjacking. They said it
could not have happened in Carlisle. And again Ms.
Smith changed her story. And then she confessed.
She was given her rights and she confessed.
Confessed that there had not been a carjacking;
there was no black man in a toboggan; she had rolled
her children and her Mazda Protege down a ramp into
John D. Long Lake and they drowned strapped in their
car seats.

Now, once you had the confession, you have got
to ask, it's going to go through everybody's mind,
how? Why? How could something like this be?

We intend to introduce evidence that Ms. Smith
was not insane the night she did this. She knew
right from wrong. We intend to introduce evidence
that she could conform her conduct to the
requirements of the law. She knew right from wrong.
She could control her actions if she had wanted to,
and she did not.

 So this comes down to one thing. This was a
conscious decision on the part of Ms. Smith to kill
her own children. This was a conscious decision.
She knew what she was doing. She knew what she was
doing, and she did it. She went ahead and did it.

 Now, once knowing that, that this was her
choice to do it, she knew it was wrong and made a
choice to do it, why? That's the how, but now why?
Why would somebody do something like this? And
that's going to be the next part that I will prove
to you, what we would call the motive of why.

 We are going to introduce testimony through
witnesses from this witness stand that Ms. Smith had
dated and was, in fact, in love with a man named Tom
Findlay. He's the son of the owner of the Conso
plant. They had had a relationship. Ms. Smith
wanted it to be much more of a relationship than Mr.
Findlay did. The stumbling block to Ms. Smith
getting Mr. Findlay, Tom Findlay, was her children,
Susan's children.

Tom Findlay wrote a letter to Ms. Smith before
this happened, which we are going to introduce to
y'all, and you can read it, where he states that
they can never have a serious relationship. Now,
Tom Findlay named several factors. But the biggest
one is that he is not ready to have children,
period, much less somebody else's children. Now, in
Ms. Smith's mind this becomes the stumbling block of
why she can't have Tom Findlay. This is what's
between her and Tom Findlay. The children are the
obstacle.

On the night of October 25th, 1994, Ms. Smith
removed that obstacle from her life. She removed
that obstacle between her and Tom Findlay in her
mind when she rolled her children down that ramp and
drowned. That is going to be the underlying motive
for this case.

And we are going to put up another witness
where Ms. Smith stated to her -- this was a
co-worker at Conso. Ms. Smith stated that she was
in love with Tom Findlay, but they could never be
together because of her - Ms. Smith's - children.
This is Ms. Smith's removing the obstacle between
her and whatever she wanted. This is the case of
selfishness. This is a case of I, I, I and me, me,
me. And that's the bottom line in this case.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to -- the
last phase of our case is going to involve the
recovery of the Mazda Protege from John D. Long Lake
on the night of November 3rd with the children
strapped in the car seats. It's going to finish
with the autopsies of those children as to their
deaths.

This is a difficult situation for y'all to be
in, and we understand that. And we appreciate it.
And in a sense I want to apologize in advance. None
of y'all asked to be on this jury, not one of you.
And there probably isn't a one of you that wouldn't
rather not be on it. But we felt like each of y'all
saw that this was your duty, and it is your duty,
but you are going to have to see things in this case
that you don't want to see. And you are going to
have to hear things that you don't want to hear.
You are going to have to think about things that you
would rather not think about it. It is going to be
difficult, but we picked you because we thought you
would be fair, and we believe that you will be.

This isn't going to be anything like the O.J.
case that goes on for months. Mr. Pope and I intend
to put up our case hopefully in three or four days.
So we would just ask you to listen closely during
that time to the different things that are
presented.

And I would tell you to never abandon your
common sense. You come in here and you wonder if
you are equipped to be a juror. You have never had
any experience with the law, the law books, and you
wonder, you know, what makes me qualified to be a
juror? Just the fact that you all lived as long as
you have and the life experiences that you have been
through make y'all the most qualified people in this
world to be in this case. So don't ever abandon
your common sense. Listen to the evidence, and you
will do what's right.

The last thing I point out is, if you recall,
in this phase we are only talking about guilt or
innocence. There is no question as to any
punishment at this point. Y'all's sole decision in
this stand is guilty or not guilty. Now, the only
evidence the State would present at this time is to
that issue.

Again, I want to thank y'all for serving. We
have every confidence that you will do a fair and
good job.

The defense is going to speak to you now and
then the State will start putting up its evidence.

Thank you very much.