by Tegan Sattel, 2L
On the night of Jan.13, 2003, Susan Wright came to her breaking point with her husband, Jeff Wright, whose behavior she alleges turned abusive shortly after their marriage in 1998. She claims that her husband came home from a boxing lesson and punched their 4-year-old son, Bradley, in the face, after Bradley told Jeff that he didn’t want to play-box with him anymore. At that point, Susan gave her husband an ultimatum – either he had to get help for his drug and anger issues, or Susan was going to take the children and leave. Determined to make Susan pay for her desire to leave him – for what he saw as her “disobedience” to him – Jeff attacked Susan, according to her brief, first pushing her to the floor, and then repeatedly kicking her in the stomach, before dragging her to their bed where he sexually assaulted her. Sometime after Susan drifted off into a fitful sleep, she claims that she awoke to see Jeff straddling her with a knife in his hands, yelling, “Die, bitch, die.” Susan managed to summon the strength to shove her husband aside, grab the knife, and stab him 193 times.
The abuse that Susan suffered at the hands of Jeff over the course of their marriage instilled in her a constant feeling of being trapped, according to experts in the field of battered women’s syndrome, or BWS, whom Susan’s appellate attorney, Brian Wice, referred to in his briefs, and caused her to build Jeff up in her mind as an inescapable, omnipotent presence. As a result, after killing him, Susan was convinced that her husband wasn’t truly dead, and that he was coming back to kill her. Using a work dolly, she took Jeff’s body to the back yard and buried him in a hole that he had dug months earlier for a new fountain. Over the next five days, Susan made multiple trips to the gardening store to get more dirt to cover her husband’s body, still convinced that he was going to come back and kill her. Even after Susan’s family retained counsel and checked her into a secure psychiatric facility on the fifth day, she still believed that Jeff was coming after her.
In February of 2004, Susan’s case went to trial and very quickly became a three-ring courtroom circus. Kelly Siegler, the top prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, took advantage, according to Brian Wice, of Susan’s lawyers’ failure to call experts in the field of BWS to testify that her belief that Jeff was going to kill her or her children was reasonable, given the mindset of domestic violence victims that their only reasonable course of action is to kill their abusers. Siegler, argued Wice, was able to exploit the many myths and misconceptions surrounding BWS, painting Susan as a cold-hearted liar and cold-blooded killer. Besides failing to produce BWS experts, Susan’s young, inexperienced, and ultimately overmatched defense team failed to call the psychologist who had evaluated Susan after the killing. Wice later argued on appeal that the psychologist’s testimony would have been invaluable in helping jurors understand Susan’s traumatized, disoriented, and borderline-psychotic mental state. Specifically, he argued the psychologist would have explained the fact that Susan stabbed her husband 193 times was symptomatic of her loss of control that also showed her reasonable belief that Jeff was going to come after her. In addition, defense counsel failed to produce Jeff Wright’s former fiancée, Misty McMichael. According to Wice, McMichael’s testimony would have not only corroborated Susan’s claims of abuse, but also would have strengthened the reasonableness of Susan’s claim of self-defense, as well as her contention that she acted as a result of sudden passion, which would have reduced murder to manslaughter. Finally, Siegler actually reenacted her theory of the murder, using the Wrights’ bloodstained bed and a fellow prosecutor as Exhibits A and B. The jury ultimately rejected her claims of self-defense and sudden passion, and sentenced her to 25 years in prison.
Believing that justice was not done, defense attorney Brian Wice, who had covered the Wright trial as a legal analyst for NBC’s Houston station, KPRC, as well as MSNBC and Court-TV, decided to take on Susan’s appeal without charge. Six years and several hundred-thousand dollars of pro bono legal fees and expenses later, Wice managed to do what most legal pundits, according to Wice, thought was virtually impossible. Last October, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, one of the most prosecution-oriented appellate courts in the nation, unanimously held that Susan’s trial lawyers’ failure to investigate and present mitigating evidence as to BWS denied Susan the effective assistance of counsel during the punishment stage of her trial. With the new evidence, the court held that a jury could very well have decided that Susan acted out of sudden passion arising from an adequate cause, making her guilty of the lesser offense of manslaughter, reducing the punishment range.
Susan’s case has drawn a great deal of media attention not only on a local level, but on a national one as well, with an episode of the CBS news program 48 Hours Mystery dedicated to the case set to air on May 15. On April 19, SW will host a lecture by Wice, who will talk about his experiences working on Susan’s case and its significance in terms of broader legal issues, such as ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial over-reaching, and the importance of BWS experts in cases where the accused are battered women in order to defuse the myths and misconceptions about battered women that jurors likely have.
You can come support this exciting event, hosted by the Criminal Law Society, Women’s Law Society and Law and Medicine Society on Monday, April 19, at 12:30 p.m. in Bullocks Wilshire 370. Food and beverages will be provided.
