Did I Do It?

BRIEF AGAINST DEATH by Edgar Smith, with an introduction by William F. Buckley Jr. 364 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

On March 5, 1957, the body of 15-year-old Schoolgirl Victoria Zielinski, her brains splattered about, was found along the bank of a sandpit in Mahwah, NJ. Within three months, Edgar Smith, 23, a knockabout machinist, was charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death for her murder. Eleven years later, challenging the death-house limbo record set by Caryl Chessman, Edgar Smith is still alive, fighting--and writing--for his life.

Brief Against Death is a detailed did-I-do-it? Smith's conviction was based on a tight chain of circumstantial evidence. By his own admission, he was with the murdered girl shortly before her death. He also concedes that he slapped her, but from that point on his story differs from that of the prosecution. Smith claims that he left the girl alive. According to the prosecution, he tried to rape her, and then he beat her to death.

Smith characterizes his trial as a hurry-up affair, marred by an inept defense and an inexperienced judge in a lynchlike atmosphere. Crucial facts, such as fixing the time of death, were botched by his attorney. The case against him, Smith suggests, was founded on shoddy police investigatory work and was somewhat in the nature of a frameup. The actual bases of his many appeals for a rehearing and retrial, which have kept him alive these many years, involve improper trial procedures and the applicability of the Supreme Court rulings regarding forced confession and post-indictment police interrogations.

Loser's Cause. In the death house of the New Jersey state prison in Trenton, Smith, a high school dropout, has ambitiously educated himself. An enrollee in many college correspondence courses, he also subscribes to publications as diverse as National Review and the Peking Review. He is obviously intelligent, and his prose, though sometimes wooden, is sturdy. What his brief suffers from most is--as he himself says--the fact that "I am by nature a transcendentally unemotional, matter-of-fact individual, the antithesis of what a man testifying in his own behalf, with his life at stake, should be."

But this is a book that must be judged on its own special terms. "Is Edgar Smith guilty?" Author Smith asks on the penultimate page. "If at this point the reader cannot respond with an emphatic 'yes', then I shall consider this book a success." Most readers will feel that he has raised sufficient doubts about the case, but many will wish that their response could have been more enthusiastic.

Ironically, Smith's fundamental argument--that he was not accorded his constitutional rights to counsel and to silence--would today suffice to get any other suspect a new trial. The U.S. Supreme Court decisions on Escobedo and Miranda deal favorably with situations like Smith's. But those landmark decisions were written since Smith's trial eleven years ago, and are not retroactive. His petition to the Supreme Court to vacate his conviction is pending; he has a stay of execution until that decision is made.

The cause of a loser like Smith is rarely associated with a stalwart conservative. Yet Smith's greatest champion is none other than William F. Buckley Jr., who befriended him several years ago after learning that he was a reader of National Review. Buckley, who provides a moving introduction to Brief Against Death, has also written this eloquent advocacy in Smith's behalf: "Edgar Smith went to the Death House not far removed from the wasteful class of humanity. He emerges as a most extraordinary man who may not succeed in triumphing over the chair, but who has clearly triumphed over himself."

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