LEAR'S
May 1993

A Woman for Lear's

Trial Blazer

Suzelle Smith of Malibu, California

The case was a damage suit against a shopping mall in Pasadena, California, following the rape and murder of a young woman named Lois Haro in 1988. Haro had been abducted from the mall’s underground parking garage by two teenage males who had taken her to the grounds of the Rose Bowl, raped her, and shot her through the head as she pleaded for her life. Haro’s family—her husband and parents—decided to hold the mall liable for damages. To represent them in litigation they chose attorney Suzelle Smith.

Suzelle is thinly petite, five feet three inches tall. Her eyes are large and pale blue, set in an oval, vividly pretty face, and her black hair is artfully tousled into controlled chaos—the words she uses to describe her life. Relaxing in the dramatic, high-ceilinged living room of the house in Malibu that she shares with two young sons, she looks more like a slip of a girl than a high-powered lawyer.

At the outset of the trial the lawyer for the defense seemed confident, Suzelle recalls.

He had already defended the mall, success fully, against a similar suit, and Suzelle thought he felt secure in his argument: that bad things sometimes happen to good people; that the mall wasn’t responsible. The jury was white and upper-middle-class—manager types and housewives, including one woman who owned apartment houses. Moreover, the victim’s husband, Tony Haro, was a Latino. And as Suzelle Smith now says of her opponent: "He thought I was a cream puff."

Following her opening remarks, Suzelle laid out her case. The mall’s owner had put profits ahead of public safety. The garage security was wholly inadequate, despite a history of violent crimes on the premises—including an incident five years earlier, when a nine-year-old girl named Jenny Kao had been raped and murdered in the mall’s freight elevator.

But Suzelle’s underlying strategy was to make the jury identify her with Lois. To that end, she sat alone at the attorney’s table and had her clients—Lois’s parents and husband, Tony—sit behind her in the public seats.

Male jurors tend to see Suzelle as a daughter figure and feel protective. To young women she is a role model, and older women have maternal feelings. Occasionally, a young man will wink at her from the jury box. No one views her as a predator in court—an advantage she can use against her male opponents.

Suzelle’s appearance has not always worked in her favor. Indeed, since childhood she has fought to live down her delicate looks. She resents people’s amazement at her abilities—"as though I'm a dog walking on its hind legs," she says. Sometimes judges, by reflex, cede courtroom leadership to the male lawyer; saying, "Gentlemen, who would like to go first?" Suzelle answers, "Excuse me, Your Honor, I'm sure you meant to include me."

Jockeying for position, male lawyers may condescend to Suzelle during a trial call her "honey" or "baby" While addressing a witness, an opposing attorney may stand behind her at the table and put a hand on her shoulder, implying his control to the jury Some put an arm around her or pat her, as if to say, "Don’t worry I’ll take it easy on you."

Some male lawyers are flirtatious. One while the jury was in the box, passed her a note saying, "Mortal enemies by day do not have to be adversaries in the evening." He included the number of his hotel room. "In your wildest dreams," she whispered in reply. The outcome: "I beat him thoroughly," she says with satisfaction.

Suzelle Smith was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, where her mother, Sis, told her that a woman shouldn’t let a man know she was intelligent. "Let him win the tennis game," Sis said. Suzelle did not take her advice. Sis was a southern belle who married because that was what you did—and had four daughters before producing the requisite son and heir. Her husband, Clarence Moss, was an unsuccessful banker. He and Sis could not have maintained their lifestyle without help from Sis’s father, Francis Hare, a trial lawyer nicknamed Judge who had got his start representing blue-collar workers in injury cases against industrial giants.

The marriage was a disastrous mismatch—"a war zone," says Suzelle. As the eldest daughter, she "had to look out for the others."  When she was 20 and the younger children were still suffering the turmoil at home, she organized them to confront their parents and ask that the marriage be ended. And so it was.

Well into the trial in Pasadena, Suzelle began to feel that her case was in trouble. She had counted on Tony, her key witness, to draw the jury’s sympathy. But on the witness stand he turned out to be contained, wooden. She was afraid that the jury might think he cared little for his wife.

Suzelle was upset. "I very much believe in eternity," she explains now. "But I am passionate about this life on earth. I love it very much. And I could hardly bear that a woman was cut off in her prime, never to come to fulfillment. The waste!"

Sis always told Suzelle to avoid her own mistake—centering her life on being a wife and mother. A woman must be independent, she often argued. And Judge once said to her: "I've made a large financial investment in you. I want for you the best education money can buy, and I expect you to do the best you can with it."

Suzelle says: "My grandfather could look at me with this slight air of disappointment, and it would crush me. But he was wonderful. He taught me to read when I was four; using Greek myths. I’d pray, ‘Please, God, don’t let Judge die. " Her blue eyes glisten. "He cared for me with completely unselfish love."

Judge paid for college at Boston University, where Suzelle graduated summa cum laude in political science in 1975. She then went to Oxford for two graduate years and got first honors in political philosophy. At Oxford she fell in love with a philosophy professor, Archie Smith, an American who wore blue jeans and Brooks Brothers sweaters with frayed elbows and who combined a beguiling little-boy tenderness with a powerful intelligence. He had three Oxford degrees and was a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia, which he had entered at the age of 16.

Here at last was a man whose intellect was as quick and rich as hers. "In all my relationships with males, I had been the dominant one," Suzelle says, adding with a laugh, "Here was a man who had accomplished a lot without my assistance. In a very rarefied circle, he was loved and academically respected." She began spending most of her spare time at his place—a 15th century thatch-roofed cottage by a stream. "It was like a fairy tale," she says.

After Archie and Suzelle married, they returned to America so he could run Meredyth Vineyards, the family vineyard and winery in Middleburg, Virginia. They moved in with his parents—very conservative landed gentry. Suzelle says, "The passionate, intimate side of me wanted to absorb Archie, do everything he did." In the winery she scrubbed out vats. In the fields, sunburned, stung by bees, she picked grapes, hoisting 50-pound boxes. "I had to prove myself," she says. "The young people there took one look at me and thought, Here’s a little flower who’s going to last two seconds. I remember thinking, Well, if I faint, then I'll fall down unconscious and nobody can blame me.

"I had done what I promised myself I'd never do. I went with my husband where he wanted to go to pursue his happiness, and I tried to do what he was doing. And I had lost myself, my identity I was trying to be in his space, and it was making him feel claustrophobic and me feel very frustrated."

Suzelle interviewed for a job in Washington, D.C., with Alabama senator Howell Heflin. When he couldn’t make up his mind, she sat for a week in his outer office, captivating his staff, until he capitulated.

For two years she was the senator’s legislative assistant on the Commerce Committee, commuting between Middleburg and Washington, a one-hour drive. Once, when the president and vice president of an Alabama company came to lobby Heflin, Suzelle asked, "Gentlemen, what can I do for you?" The president said, "I take mine with cream and sugar." Then Washington people heard about her Oxford degree, they said, "That’s nice." But it was the women with law degrees who got respect. Suzelle had always been inspired by Judge, watching him in court, talking to him about the law, and she decided to follow suit.

Suzelle graduated in the top 10 percent of her class at the University of Virginia Law School, but refused offers from huge Washington and New York firms.  Instead she joined a 750-lawyer firm in Los Angeles—Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher— because there she felt judged more by her abilities than by her sex. Her plan—supported by Archie—was to work in LA. for six months while he stayed in Virginia and ran the vineyard. Then she would transfer to the Washington office of the firm and resume the one-hour commute.

One of the firm’s partners, Don Howarth, became her mentor and moved her quickly into the courtroom, where she assisted him on major cases. In Suzelle, Howarth had spotted the mind of a born trial lawyer: analytic, flexible, fast, unfazed by setbacks, able to see every issue from both sides and anticipate the opposition, confident in her legal intuition.

"I have been engaged in oral argument ever since I can remember" Suzelle says. As a child she always took part in the adult conversation, speaking her mind, contesting. When her father tried to lay down a law, she debated him. "I would never let him off the hook."

Suzelle instantly understood the theater of the courtroom, the dramas produced to persuade a jury. She had the right sense of staging and timing, and thrilled to the risk of a high-stakes performance. "There’s a saying in the Mafia," Don Howarth explains. "if you can’t lose big, you can’t win big. That’s what we thrive on." Says Suzelle: "Whoever said winning isn’t everything wasn’t a trial lawyer."

At the Haro trial, Suzelle put Tony Haro’s therapist, a woman, on the witness stand. Suzelle stood behind the far end of the jury box so that the therapist seemed to be talking directly to the jury.  Under questioning, the therapist explained a Latino man’s reluctance to show emotion in public, his fear of crying. She explained Tony’s feelings of guilt, his idea that somehow he should have prevented the murder his questioning of everything in his life. Broken dreams. Broken visions. Suzelle’s questions were bringing alive Tony’s love for his wife, a beautiful, sensitive woman who had spent the last minutes of her life forced to commit violent, horrific sex acts.

Suzelle asked the therapist to read a letter that Tony had written to friends about "my wife, my friend, and my lover... who I loved deeply with all my heart." The letter included a poem that Lois had written to Tony "I lift my voice/I lift my head/I lift my life up to you/I am an offering to you. All that I have/All that I am/All that I hope to give to you."

The therapist began to cry. Suzelle said, "Take a minute. I know this is hard to read," The court reporter was crying. The jurors were crying. Suzelle fought to keep her face expressionless.

At Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Suzelle was a burr under the saddle, too independent, a brilliant upstart. In 1985 she approached Don Howarth about leaving the firm and hanging out a shingle together Howarth & Smith. He agreed. The firm was an instant powerhouse, representing Fortune 500 clients in damage suits involving millions of dollars. The firm also takes plaintiffs cases, such as the Haro suit; at 39, Suzelle has never lost one, and the verdicts in her defense cases also have been favorable.

Archie and Suzelle became a bicoastal couple. When friends suggested to Archie that he tell her to come back, his reaction was, "I admire the hell out of what she’s done. If some people disapprove of our living arrangement, that’s too damn bad."

Suzelle admits: "Part of me wanted him to say, ‘No, no, Suzelle, I can’t live without you. This will kill me. " Another part was terrified. Would she end up a failure, crawling back to Virginia? Was she as independent as she thought? A third part was excited by the risk.

Suzelle’s family disapproved. She told them, "First of all, Archie and I are fine, If this were reversed, there'd be no question. You don’t say to him, ‘Why aren’t you in California with Suzelle? Why am I the ogre here? Anyway, Archie is a workaholic, and if I were at home waiting by the fireplace with the cassoulet bubbling in the oven, I’ d be waiting alone."

Though Archie and Suzelle are apart for weeks at a time, they average about seven days together out of a month: One of them flies to one coast or the other, or they rendezvous in some city where Suzelle is working. Absence breeds romance, they find. "When we’re together," Suzelle says, "we're very much aware of each other."

Now they have two sons, Ames, six, and Charles, three, who live with Suzelle and travel with her to see their father. She’s not concerned about being out at work every day. "You want to protect your children so much," she says, "but I look at my grandfather, who was an orphan, and he came out strong. I grew up in a dysfunctional family. I don’t want the boys’ world to be so perfect and sheltered that they are somehow weakened." But Suzelle is at home in the evenings, hearing about the school day, listening to Ames play the piano, giving baths, reading stories. And to care for the children she has the full-time help of Carolyn McDonald, who used to work for Judge in Birmingham.

Suzelle’s house in the foothills of Malibu is made of natural wood and glass overlooks the ocean. The driveway winds up a slope through purple and blue flowers. There’s a swimming pool, a paddle tennis court, a Porsche in the garage. Inside, the floors are pale wood, and off-white walls rise to cathedral ceilings. The sparse furniture is white. In this ivory cosmos the only jolt of color is the painting over the fireplace–a portrait of Suzelle and the children by Jamie Wyeth.

The family dynamics are captured in Wyeth’s perceptive work: Suzelle sits with her sons on a huge ship’s anchor, but her gaze is directed away, a woman pulled between two worlds. Charles is entwined with his mother—the boy who, at bedtime, is all butter, smiling and saying "Yes" when his mother, hugging him, whispers, "Do you know how much I love you?"

In the picture, Ames sits with his back to the others. In fact, he is a self-sufficient boy, a computer whiz absorbed in programming books, and impudently scornful of what he sees as his mother’s mental limitations. He loves arguing with her, taking a proposition and wrestling it to the ground. Looking into his blue eyes, Suzelle thinks, This is my punishment. I drove my parents crazy. This is me come back to haunt myself. I deserve it.

About her marriage she says: "Archie and I have to organize our lives constantly, but the downsides have yet to materialize. He never brings this up, but sometimes I'll say, ‘Well, you know, is it happening, the deterioration everybody predicted?

"Archie answers, ‘I don’t think so. Will you just relax? Just live. Do you always want to dissect everything? "

As the trial at Pasadena drew to a close after four weeks of testimony, Suzelle made her final summation to the jury. "This is a case of David versus Goliath," she recalls telling them. She evoked the previous rape-murder, then spoke of Lois Haro. "What is the value of Lois’s smile, her warmth, her soul?" she asked. "What is the value of the encouragement that she gave to her family, her friends; her joy and yet her tears; her sharing, her praise, her moral support to the people who loved her?" Finally: "If you say... [the security] is not adequate, then these defendants will listen. . . . You are the voice and the conscience of the community. . . . You cannot wash your hands of this. It’s a grave responsibility."

Suzelle won. The damages assessed were $3.5 million for Tony Haro and Lois’s parents. Suzelle remembers the mall’s lawyer ashen, incredulous. She says, "He ignored me from the beginning. He never realized what I was doing."

To Suzelle it was "a vindication of the rights of real people against a very powerful, respected corporation that resisted its responsibility with all its power and might." It was also a vindication of her legal strategy and of herself, providing the high-octane satisfaction that fuels her life.

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