Brief Against Death: Written by Edgar Smith in His Eleventh Year on Death Row by Edgar Smith, William F. Buckley Jr. (Foreword)
Requirements: .PDF reader, 13.2 MB
Overview: On June 6, 1957, the author of this book was convicted of the brutal murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. For more than eleven years he has lived in the shadow of the electric chair in the Death House of the New Jersey State Prison.
Brief Against Death is Edgar Smith’s firsthand account of his arrest, interrogation, trial, imprisonment, and 4,000-day battle, through fourteen appeals and thirteen stays of execution, to set aside the verdict and establish his innocence. It is the story of a man without status, with no money, with little formal education, who was connected circumstantially to a horrifying crime, interrogated without counsel by the police for nearly twenty consecutive hours, prosecuted on the basis of an unsigned statement in which he confessed to no crime whatsoever, tried in an atmosphere of inflammatory press coverage and public furor, convicted in the face of strikingly contradictory evidence-and who has found within himself the resources of mind and courage to fight his case through the labyrinthine machinery of the courts. Edgar Smith was twenty-three years old when, on the morning of March 5, 1957, the body of Victoria Zielinski of Mahwah, New Jersey, was found in a sandpit, her skull crushed by a rock, her clothes torn and disheveled in a fashion to suggest sexual assault. That same day Smith was picked up by the police. Strong circumstantial evidence linked him to the crime. But at the trial the coroner’s testimony for the prosecution indicated that the time of the murder was at least two hours after Smith had arrived in another town, with his wife and baby, to spend the night with his in-laws. Incredibly, this and other glaring inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case failed to save him from conviction. Once the police and the prosecutor’s office had settled on Smith as the likely murderer, no legal, logical, or human considerations could halt the seemingly inexorable train of events that closed the doors of the State Prison behind him three months later. In the eleven years of solitary confinement he has undergone since then-nine of them spent in an eight-foot-square windowless cell-Edgar Smith, learning the mazes of law, fighting for his life, has managed almost miraculously to widen his horizons, to educate himself, to initiate and direct the series of legal appeals that have again and again postponed his sentence of electrocution, and to complete, on the eve of his fifteenth appeal, the handwritten manuscript of Brief Against Death. The man himself is remarkable, and he tells his story with a remarkable objectivity that intensifies the reader’s response to his ordeal. His book is a unique human document-and one of utmost importance to all who are concerned with the workings of criminal justice in America.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
EDGAR SMITH was born on February 8, 1934, in Hasbrouck Heights, an upper-middle-class community in New Jersey about ten miles west of New York City. He was five when his parents separated, and he and his older brother were raised by their mother after the divorce in 1941. He had not quite completed his high-school education when he joined the United States Marine Corps in 1952, volunteering for parachute training. Most of his time in service for the next two and a half years was spent on regular flights throughout the Far East, carrying military and medical supplies, replacement troops, and wounded to and from places such as Honolulu, Itami in Japan, Johnston Island, Kwajalein, Guam, Okinawa, Formosa, Hong Kong, Midway, Manila, Korea, and what is now Vietnam. Discharged in November 1954 for a service-connected hearing loss, non permanent, in his left ear, Smith returned to his family home in Ramsey and tried his hand at various jobs. He was twenty-three years old, and had a well-paying job as a machinist, and was living with his wife and infant daughter in a house trailer when he was arrested on suspicion of murder, tried, and convicted on circumstantial evidence. Since June 6, 1957, he has been kept in a solitary-confinement cell in the Death House of the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton.
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