A large, glowing photo of a bullet wound loomed over the courtroom Tuesday during the latest hearing for Dr. Arnold Smith.
The photo, blown up on a wide screen, was meant to illustrate on the part of the defense the fatal bullet that entered the top of alleged hitman Keaira Byrd’s skull and lodged in his jaw. But it also seemed to forecast the climate of the legal proceedings that would follow: tense and dramatic, with Smith staring down his accusers at the prosecutor’s table.
Byrd was killed by an unnamed investigator from the Attorney General’s Office during a confrontation at attorney Lee Abraham’s Market Street law office. Prosecutors have said that Smith offered Byrd $20,000 in an unsuccessful attempt to murder the attorney.
Smith, 71, has been held without bond in the Leflore County Jail on conspiracy charges in the alleged murder-for-hire plot.
The Greenwood oncologist had also been charged with capital murder in the death of Byrd, but specially appointed Circuit Judge Breland Hilburn threw out that charge Tuesday. The judge, though, did leave open the possibility that Smith could face the lesser charge of depraved heart murder in Byrd’s death.
Tense exchanges at Tuesday’s hearings began early on.
While one of Smith’s attorneys, William Bell of Ridgeland, was delivering an oral argument at the hearing’s inception, Assistant District Attorney Tim Jones slammed his hand down on his desk and whispered something to Smith, who sat just a few feet away from him.
Hilburn peered over the bench to Jones to see what sparked the disruption. Jones said that Smith was “fixating on me, and I was just wondering if he’s having trouble seeing me.”
Smith continued to stare at Jones intermittently throughout the hearing.
A visibly agitated Jones later apparently bypassed a procedural rule that dissuades opposing attorneys from addressing one another in court. Rather, they are expected to address one another through the presiding judge.
The prosecutor interrupted another of Smith’s attorneys, Hugo Rodriguez of Miami, when Rodriguez was complaining to the judge that the crime scene was cleaned up too quickly.
“I have no walls, I have no floors,” he said. “I have no blood splatter that an examiner could examine. They did not preserve them.”
“You leave bodies there, too?” Jones said to the opposing counsel.
Rodriguez asked if Jones was speaking directly to him. When Jones said yes, Rodriguez said that he’d prefer it if the assistant DA would address the judge.
“I don’t play that way, Mr. Jones,” Rodriguez said.
Smith, dressed in tan prison garb, looked dazed and disconnected throughout most of the proceeding. He brought with him a copy of James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” the purported semi-autobiographical account of a drug addict that was criticized upon its publication in 2003 for being largely untrue. At the end of the hearing, Smith gave the book to Dr. Gilbert S. Macvaugh, a psychologist hired by the defense who has claimed that Smith is incompetent and unfit to stand trial.
“That’s good,” he told Macvaugh.
Jones declined to speculate after the hearing when asked whether he thought Smith was putting on a show.
“I don’t know why he was staring at me,” said Jones. “Perhaps you can ask him.”
