Mother Acquitted After Daughter’s Deathbed Statement

MIAMI —  A 68-year-old woman was acquitted of attempted murder charges Wednesday, a day after jurors watched a videotape of a dramatic deathbed deposition by the victim: the defendant’s paralyzed daughter.

“There’s no way, no way she would shoot me,” Georgette Smith, 42, said of her mother, Shirley Egan, just hours before she died. “There is no way. I’m sure it was an accident. I know it was. She can’t see that good.”

In fact, Egan did shoot her daughter in March, and the bullet left Smith a quadriplegic unable to swallow or control her bladder. Smith went to court for permission to have herself removed from life support and died May 19 after a judge ruled that the ventilator could be disconnected.

But a jury in Orlando found that Egan, a frail woman who had been taking various prescription pain killers, was not capable of forming the intent to commit murder when she picked up a .38-caliber handgun and fired toward Smith and Smith’s boyfriend, Larry Videlock.

Videlock escaped injury. But a bullet hit Smith in the neck, severing her spine.

After the injury, Smith said her life was not worth living and filed suit to force an Orlando nursing home to take her off life support. A county circuit court judge ruled in her favor.

Smith died 46 minutes after the ventilator was switched off.

The case drew national attention because of the knotty ethical questions raised by Smith’s determination to end her life. Many doctors, counselors and quadriplegics tried to change her mind, arguing that medical technology and the promise of advances toward a cure for paralysis made survival worthwhile.

But Smith could not be dissuaded. Her two adult daughters supported their mother’s decision.

The case also was rare because prosecutors vowed to charge Egan with first-degree murder once Smith died. State Atty. Lamar Lawson later decided to bring lesser charges, citing Egan’s poor health and her close relationship with her daughter. She was acquitted on two counts of attempted murder.

The wrenching, emotional climax of trial testimony came Tuesday, when spellbound jurors watched a videotaped deposition taken from Smith just hours before her death. The tape was introduced by prosecutors, and it was the only evidence that Egan had shot Smith.

But Smith’s answers to prosecutors’ questions were clearly designed to exonerate her mother. “I love her dearly,” Smith said. “She is the best friend.”

Twice during the trial Tuesday, Egan was ordered out of the courtroom by Judge Thomas Mihok after verbal outbursts. After one pro-prosecution ruling by the judge, the frail, diminutive defendant jumped out of her wheelchair, shouting, “This is not fair!”

In her defense, Egan’s attorney Robert Wesley argued that Egan had been too addled by a cocktail of prescription drugs to form the intent to attempt murder. Frail, blind in one eye and recovering from 39 fractures suffered when hit by a truck in 1997, Egan was on antidepressants, antibiotics, steroids, tranquilizers and other drugs at the time of the shooting.

Wesley said his client was involuntarily intoxicated on the drugs. “She was angry, crazy, irrational,” he told jurors. “She was incapable of doing this intentionally.”

But prosecutor Pam Smith countered with statements Egan made to detectives after the shooting, in which she admitted being angry at both Videlock and her daughter after hearing them discuss whether to put her in a nursing home.