Page 13 - Smitty Smith News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> announcer: with bridgett gone, smitty's alibi looked flimsy and prosecutor rick garfield now turned to the death bed statement of david bostick. >> smitty put himself in the presence of yankee that night. so if he was present with yankee and if bostick was positive that yankee was there, that kills his alibi. >> announcer: with the death penalty hanging in the balance, smitty made a risky move and demanded to take the stand. >> when a defendant testifies in a criminal case, you are hitting the reset button. if the jury believes the defendant, he will walk. if the jury does not believe the d...

In, he's convicted of the five murders he's previously been aquited of and he's acquitted of the one murder he's never been tried for before. smitty's the only person in my experience and i think probably in the entire world who has been quatd of every single murder he's ever been charged with but is still serving the rest of his life in prison. >> clive feels the government abused their power to put smitty away. >> when the government uses that, they're trying to kill people. no less than hall and hawley killed people. that's what smitty was trying to say. they're trying to kill me. instead o...

Without a cause, and the truth is they're of more organized. they're more like a paramilitary criminal organization. they're mafia on wheels. >> narrator: in the 1970s, president nixon signed into law the racketeering influenced corrupt organization act, better known as rico. >> we shall now be able to launch a total war against organized crime, and we will win this war. >> originally the rico laws were to focus on organized crime. >> traditional la cosa nostra, think the god father, the sopranos kind of thing. the purpose was to take down an organization as opposed to just one individual for ...

To corroborate what j.j. hall and karl holley said, but even that wasn't going to get smitty acquitted. >> narrator: once again, smitty demanded to testify on his own behalf. >> over the years i've tried quite a lot of capital cases, and very rarely do i call my client. >> it is just considered to be suicide. >> i didn't testify in my first trial, and i've been holding my breath, waiting to get up here in this courtroom so i could express myself. i told them i wasn't guilty of nothing. it came down to the jury believing either me or them. >> narrator: after a week-long trial, the jury returned...

Notorious motorcycle club called "the outlaws" and smitty was the regional president. >> and the gang outlaws was more or less an organized crime syndicate type of thing. >> they were a hard-core motorcycle gang. >> and they had a representation of either being in the drug trade or prostitution or things like that. >> according to the shefr's department, of the 125 outlaw members of the broward chapter between 1975 and '79, there was a total of 56 felony convictions against the members. >> announcer: the morning after the murders, detectives moody and benoit tracked smitty to a house in ft. la...