Case Synopsis
Suspect (SGT Jeremy Smith)
Wife (Doris Smith)
Ex-girlfriend (Cara Bell)
Victim (Mari Witt)
Victim's husband (LT Lyle Witt)
Witness (Betty Tran)
Eyewitness (Seth Kimp)
Potential second suspect? Neighbor (Billy Campbell)
Waiter/Waitress (Gale Forrest)
A day after posting an ad placing their dog for sale, the victim, Mrs. Mari Witt, was tied up, assaulted and
then murdered. Her husband LT Witt with the Air Force was on duty at Fort Wilke and was nowhere near
the crime scene when his wife, Mari Witt, was murdered. Their 18 month old daughter was found crying
in her crib by the Lyles' neighbor, Mr. Billy Campbell, the day after the murder. Cash and an ATM card
were the only items missing from the house.
Eyewitness Seth Kimp identified a suspicious car at the crime scene as the one police now know belonged
to SGT Jeremy Smith with the U.S. Navy.
Cara Bell, the suspect's ex-girlfriend, stated that she saw SGT Smith on the night in question.
On the night of the murder, Mr. Campbell was eating dinner at Arlan Steakhouse and waiter/waitress Gale
Forrest has corroborated the fact that he always comes in for the Tuesday night special, meatloaf and that
he was in fact in the restaurant on the night of the murder.
Unit 7 Constitutional Law connection and Final exam
You will be working for the next four blocks on the case listed above. Some of you will be lawyers,
witnesses, reporters, forensic specialists, police officers, and detectives.
Your trial will be on the day of your class exam. That being said, that will give you two hours (the length of
the exam time) to have this trial.
1B: June 11
3A: June 12
4A: June 12
4B: June 13
On May 29(B) and May 30(A), you will be expected to turn in a two - three page analysis on how the
case in class relates to our Unit on Constitutional Law. You must identify the amendment or amendments
that relate to this case and give a detailed analysis of how this case relates to each amendment. Be sure to
include what the amendment says and your analysis of what it actually means.
This paper should be double spaced and in twelve point font. This paper will count as an assessment
grade and a final exam grade.
The rest
When Mari Witt was brutally murdered near Fort Lynnhaven just before Mother's Day in 1983, police
quickly closed in on a suspect: Sgt. Smith was tried and sentenced to death the very next year.
But in 1987, Smith won the right to a new trial; this time, he was acquitted.
But there are some loopholes there, and one of them tightened around Smith’s neck: Civilian and military
courts operate independently. Smith was acquitted by a civilian court.
TWIST
In 2010, in view of DNA evidence based on technology not yet available during his earlier trials, a
military court sentenced Smith to death. Smith still maintains that he's innocent. His lawyers are still
disputing the legality of the court martial.
The beginning
Lyle and Mari Witt married in 1973 after meeting at a baseball game. He became the chief of air traffic
control at Parke Air Force Base, near Farm, Virginia. In 1983 he accepted a transfer to a job in England.
Worried about putting their English Setter in quarantine as UK pet regulations demand, they decided to
leave her behind. Mari Witt took out an ad in the Patriot News, a free classifieds paper serving Fort
Lynnhaven and Parke AFB, offering the dog to a good home for just $10.
Jeremy Smith and his wife, Doris, decided to take the dog, if it got along with their dog, Simon. On the
Monday before Mother’s Day, he met with Mari Witt at her home at123 Ocean Road and left with the
dog.
Lyle Witt was at squadron officers' training school in Little Neck, South Carolina. He started worrying
when he didn't receive his wife's planned Thursday morning phone call. On Friday, LT Witt finally got a
call, but it was from a detective.
Neighbor Billy Campbell had noticed that the family's newspapers were starting to pile up and he hadn't
seen anyone for a while. When Mr.Campbell dropped by to knock on the door, he heard a crying baby.
He called police, who encountered a grisly scene.
Mari Witt had been tied up, assaulted, and stabbed fifteen times. Those injuries were more than enough to
kill the woman; in a shocking example of what police call "overkill", the attacker had also slit her throat.
Some cash and an ATM card were the only things missing from the house. The assailant seemed to have
tried to clean the place up. But Sgt. Jeremy Smith presence wouldn't go unnoticed.
Another neighbor, Seth Kimp, told police that he'd seen a man leaving the Ocean Road house Tuesday
night, the same night that forensics experts believed Mari Witt was murdered. Mr. Kimp described a tall
man wearing a black Members Only jacket and carrying a large garbage bag as he walked from the house
to a blue IROC-Z.
When police released a sketch of the man Mr.Kimp saw and a description of the car, Sgt. Jeremy Smith
and his wife saw it on the evening news. It was only then, he would always claim, that he realized that the
victims were the family who had sold him the dog. He voluntarily went to investigators. He was the
spitting image of the man in the sketch and he drove a blue IROC-Z. And he had brought a black
Members Only jacket to a dry cleaner that Wednesday. Neighbors said he'd been burning unidentified
material in an oil drum in his backyard that morning too.
Mr.Kimp picked Smith out of a line-up. Sgt. Smith willingly provided blood and saliva samples, and he
seemed confident in his loose alibi. He told cops that on Tuesday night he'd dropped his wife and children
off at his in-laws and gone straight home to work on the dollhouse he was building for his daughter.
Later, ex-girlfriend Cara Bell would tell detectives that Smith had made a brief, unannounced visit to her
home that night, presumably to rekindle their relationship. They talked about his money problems and he
claimed he and Doris were splitting up, but she sent him away.
The missing ATM card provided another lead. Cops located the customer who had used the machine just
a couple minutes after the Witts' card was used. Betty Tran recalled that a man wearing camouflage pants
had used the ATM; looking at police mug shots, she matched the ATM user with Smith’s photo.
The case quickly went to trial.
The Navy could have court martialed Sgt. Jeremy Smith, but because the crimes against Mari Witt
occured off-base, they chose to let the case go to the Mill Dam County Superior Court in the summer of
1983.
Trial #1
Lead prosecutor Warren Vandallen offered Smith a plea bargain; Smith refused. Vandallen mounted a
case that suggested that Smith had returned to Witts’ home because he was attracted to her and knew her
husband was away, and that he turned violent when she rebuffed him.
Gerry Beaker and Smythe Landover -- the lawyers that Smith’s father, a retired OMH executive, had
hired -- fought the accusations in vain. After a three-week trial and ten hours of deliberation, the jury
found Smith guilty on first-degree murder charges and one rape charge.
During the sentencing hearing, Beaker and Landover showed a series of photos meant to depict Smith as a
kind, loving family man and thus spare his life. The judge nonetheless sentenced him to death.
An anonymous writer once sent him (and the sheriff's office) a letter confessing to the murders, but Smith
spent years on death row in Romane, VA. His lawyers kept fighting.
The twist: (Read this section carefully. This is where you should be able to make your connection to
the amendment(s) either I, IV,V and/or XIV.)
Trial # 2
In 1987, the First Colonial State Supreme Court announced that it agreed with Sgt. Jeremy Smith’s
lawyers: The graphic photos of the crime scene and of the body of Mari Witt had unfairly influenced the
jurors and that some of the evidence collected from the crime scene was not obtained according to police
protocol. Smith won the right to a retrial.
Smith’s attorney Gerry Beaker resumed his role. He established that there was a mysterious stranger who
may have committed the crime: The Witts had been plagued by threatening phone calls for months before
Smith met the family. There were blood stains and hairs at the scene that belonged neither to the victims
nor the accused. The extreme brutality of the crime suggested someone with a longstanding anger toward
the family, not a man miffed at a singular rejection of a casual interest in his victim. The anonymous
confession letter that Smith had received in prison helped too.
The defense also attacked the witnesses' credibility. Billy Campbell had had trouble with police. Betty
Tran had at one point denied recognizing Smith from the ATM.
Kirt Blyth and Jame Richmon, prosecutors for the 1987 trial, seem to have been overconfident. They
failed to convince jurors that Beaker's arguments didn't hold up. Smith got off.
He returned to the Navy and was soon promoted. He was shipped to Iraq, then to Kenya, then to Fort
Whyte, Wyoming. (Lt. Lyle Witt, after finally making the delayed transfer to England, eventually moved
to Pulup, Wyoming, never realizing he was just miles from the man he still believed killed his wife). In
2002 he retired.
Meanwhile, developments were afoot that could snare Smith after all.
By 2004, new DNA technology meant that it would be possible to determine with near-certainty whether
the DNA left on Mari Witt’s body came from Jeremy Smith. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn't
matter much. Typically, Smith’s acquittal wouldn't permit a second trial.
Trial # 3
But a controversial 1987 precedent asserted that the military could court martial its members even if
they'd already been tried in civilian court.
The Beach County Sheriff's Office sent the new DNA evidence incriminating Smith to the Navy. In 2005,
the Navy recalled the retired staff sergeant to active service at Fort Barrett-- and they promptly charged
him with murder.
Prosecutors Capt. Manny Ara and Capt. Niel Sparks based their case at Smith’s 2010 court martial around
new technology. The key piece of evidence was DNA collected from Mari Witt’s body after her death in
1983. At the time, the DNA was useless. But in 2010, State Bureau of Investigation forensic analyst
Jayma Haynie was able to state that the odds were 12.1 thousand trillion to one that the DNA belonged to
Smith rather than to anyone else.
Mr. Smith is now awaiting trial for the murder of Mari Witt. Trial is set for June 2013.