“Mr. Smith, I’m going to agree with you; I think you did have a hard life,” said District Judge William P. “Bill” Smith (no relation) to defendant at John David Smith the conclusion of a criminal trial in Dickens County court last week. “All your brothers and sisters.”
It was that hard life— marked by multigenerational instances of drug abuse, frequent household moves and remarriages, and a lack of parental guidance— that characterized the circumstances of both accuser and defendant over the three days of testimony, evidence, verdict, and sentencing. And in the end it wasn’t enough to prevent a tough sentence.
On Nov. 16, Judge Smith sentenced defendant Smith, 21, of Spur, to 30 years imprisonment with credit for time already served, after a jury found him guilty of sexual assault of a child, a first-degree felony.
JD Smith, as he is familiarly known, was accused of raping a woman who is his biological half-sister in multiple instances since she was about four years old. He was arrested in Spur April 29, 2021 and has remained in custody since that time.
Both the accuser (still a minor) and the defendant took the witness stand during the three-day trial.
The jury trial was the first in a considerable while in Dickens County, and the first tried in the county by district attorney Emily Teegardin, who was appointed to the post after the resignation of Wade Jackson in January. Lubbock attorney Arthur Aguilar represented the defendant.
Evidence presented by the state included soiled bedding, clothing belonging to the accuser, and DNA analysis of blood and semen samples from these materials. Expert analysts were called to explain testing procedures and results as items were removed one by one from the evidence container by gloved personnel. Such evidence indicated the presence of JD Smith’s DNA in the samples, they testified.
On the second afternoon of the trial, with the defendant present in the small courtroom, the accuser took the stand to answer questions regarding her family relationship to the defendant, and described the acts that led up to her report of rape on the day before their grandmother’s funeral in Spur in April 2021.
The next morning, when it was his turn on the stand, the defendant denied all accusations.
Most telling, however, was a recording of a telephone call the defendant placed from the Garza County Jail to the accuser. On the audio recording, Smith appeared to beg the accuser to drop the charges in return for his apology to her.
The defendant, on the stand under oath the following day, admitted that he was not being entirely truthful in that conversation.
“At time I was 18, in county jail,” Smith told the jury. “I don’t know if any of y’all have ever been incarcerated, been in a predicament where you have to go through a challenge like this, what happens to people. I was scared. I was 18 and didn’t want to have to go down to the penitentiary and was just trying to get the charges dropped.”
The sequestered jury took about ninety minutes, sending out requests multiple times for the judge to provide clarification of the recorded phone call, before returning a unanimous “guilty” verdict.
“This was a violent physical assault, also violent emotionally, from events she had experienced all her life,” Teegardin had told the jury in closing arguments.
Hard lives, indeed.
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