Five Points shooter’s attempted murder conviction reversed by SC Supreme Court

The S.C. Supreme Court has overturned the attempted murder conviction of Michael Juan Smith, a Bloods gang member who in 2013 shot and critically injured a first-year University of South Carolina student.

In 2015, a Richland County jury sentenced Smith to 40 years in state prison. He is now entitled to a new trial, the five-member high court ruled. Its decision was unanimous.

In its ruling, issued Wednesday morning, the high court noted that Smith had been convicted of attempted murder in shooting USC student Martha Childress, then a freshman from Greenville.

But attempted murder is a crime that must have the element of intent. Since it was undisputed that Smith did not intend to shoot Childress, his conviction on that and related charges at his trial cannot stand, the high court ruled.

Jim Carpenter, a spokesman for the Childress family, said in an interview with The State that the family “is very disappointed in the ruling. He (Smith) needs to be retried, and he needs to answer for his crimes.”

Carpenter said that Childress is enrolled in school and “seems to be doing well. This caught us all by surprise - we are all affected by the ruling.”

At his 2015 trial, Smith testified that he fired his gun in self-defense because he was intending to shoot and kill a rival gang member when he shot Childress. Smith told the jury he only fired because he faced an imminent threat to his own life — a charge disputed by prosecutors.

Childress was struck by a bullet in the back on a crowded Five Points street after visiting the downtown nightspot area with friends. At the time, she was waiting for a taxi to take her back to the USC campus. In the shooting, her spinal cord was cut, leaving her in a wheelchair and paralyzed for life from the waist down.

In its decision, the Supreme Court said “there were multiple errors” in the trial that required reversal, including that the “felony attempted-murder” charge that prosecutors sought “is not a recognized crime in South Carolina.” Prosecutors went on an “unrelenting quest” to get Judge Robert Hood to include it in his jury instructions, the decision said.

Prosecutors have to charge defendants with specific crimes that are cited in previous criminal cases or in laws passed by the Legislature. But basically, in this case, when prosecutors charged Smith with “felony attempted murder,” they were charging him with a crime that doesn’t exist, the high court said.

In other words, while “attempted murder” is a crime, there’s no such thing as “felony attempted murder” — so Smith can’t be convicted of that.

Childress’ shooting focused attention on gangs in Columbia and Five Points, a downtown area saturated with bars that long has attracted USC students and other young people often amassing in large, rowdy crowds on weekends when school is in.

Fifth Circuit Solicitor Byron Gipson said Wednesday he expects the Attorney General’s Office, which was handling the state’s appeal of Smith’s case, to file a motion with the Supreme Court asking it to rehear the case. Such motions are rarely granted.

If the Supreme Court does not rehear the case, “our office will likely retry the case,” Gipson said.

Attorney General spokesman Robert Kittle said his office will be filing a petition for a rehearing.

It does not appear likely the Supreme Court will rehear the case. Its seven-page decision is strongly worded and, in addition to criticizing the prosecutors and the judge on the attempted murder matter, justices also said prosecutors had committed “gross prosecutorial overreach” by having a witness testifying in detail about Childress’ severe injuries and how someday those injuries may “cost her her life.”

That was going too far, the high court said, because if the only thing prosecutors were trying to prove was attempted murder, that specific crime does not require the state prove an injury to the victim.

In 2014, Smith also was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison by U.S. District Court Judge Joe Anderson for a federal gun violation stemming from the same crime. Smith’s federal sentence is to be served after his state sentence.

Smith, now 27, is now serving his sentence in Lee Correctional Institution, a high security facility, in South Carolina, on the attempted murder and other charges on which the jury found him guilty. All the charges against him will be vacated if the Supreme Court doesn’t overrule Wednesday’s decision.

However, there is a federal hold on Smith, meaning he would be transferred to a federal prison to serve his gun violation sentence instead of being released to be free until a new Richland County trial on the Five Points shooting.

The case was tried by 5th Circuit assistant prosecutors Luck Campbell, Dolly Garfield and Meghan Walker, who worked for then-5th Circuit Solicitor Dan Johnson.

Smith’s lawyer at trial, Aimee Zmroczek, said Wednesday she was heartened by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the verdict and sentence in an emotional case like this one.

“It’s not a popular thing for a court to do, especially in a high-profile case like this one,” Zmroczek said. “For judges to be able to sit outside all the emotion, and analyze a case exactly as we are trained to do, that’s huge.”

This story was originally published March 18, 2020 at 10:49 AM with the headline "Five Points shooter’s attempted murder conviction reversed by SC Supreme Court."