| Summary |
"By the attorney for Dr. Jay Charles Smith, who in 1986 was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Susan Reinert in 1979. After six years on death row evidence was discovered that crime writer Joseph Wambaugh had secretly promised to pay $50,000 to a Pennsylvania State Patrol officer involved in the murder investigation if he would act as a consultant for Wambaugh's book about the murder case. A year after Smith's conviction Wambaugh published the bestselling book, Echoes in the Darkness, which was made into a television mini-series. Based on the new evidence that Smith's prosecution was based on a tainted investigation, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed Smith's conviction in 1993 and barred his retrial. Smith's first-person account of the case was published in 2008 with the title, "'Joseph Wambaugh and the Jay Smith Case."" |