Brittany Smith Killed Her Rapist And May Spend Life In Prison

Back in December 2017, Brittany Smith was separated from her husband. She felt lonely and told her mother she wanted to get a puppy. Joshua Todd Smith—no relation—who goes by Todd, whom Brittany had known casually, bred Pitbulls and was selling two dogs. When they messaged each over Facebook about the dog, Todd began making romantic advances that Brittany did not reciprocate. In January 2018, Brittany went to Todd’s home and bought a dog.

The next day, Todd texted Brittany saying he was stranded in a park and asked her for help. Chris McCallie, Brittany’s brother, drove her to pick Todd up and she let him sleep on her couch that night. Todd asked why she wasn’t interested in him and she said she “never saw him that way.” He called her a bitch and chased her to her bedroom, where he proceeded to choke her until she passed out; she awoke to find him attacking her again.

After Todd raped Brittany, he told her that he would kill her and her family if she told anyone or called 911. He then asked for cigarettes and Brittany had Chris, who lived with their mother down the road, drive them to a nearby convenience store. There, while Todd stayed in the car with Chris, Brittany slipped a note to the cashier, Paige Painter, that said if she was found dead, it was Todd Smith who killed her.

After leaving the store, Chris dropped Brittany and Todd off at her house. Brittany hadn’t told Chris what happened to her but did ask him to return to the store and talk with the cashier. She also texted her mother:

“Mom Todd has tried to kill me literally. Don’t act like anything is wrong…he will kill me if he knows. Call Mapco and ask for Paige.”

Minutes later, after speaking to the store clerk, Chris arrived at his sister Brittany’s home armed with a pistol. Once inside, Chris says he set his gun on the counter and told Todd, who Brittany finally admitted had raped her earlier that night, to leave. Instead, Chris and Brittany say Todd put Chris in a headlock and began punching him. Brittany grabbed the gun and told Todd she was going to shoot; when he did not let Chris go, Brittany fired once, though she wasn’t sure the bullet hit him. Todd continued to beat Chris, and Brittany fired several more times, until Todd fell to the floor. Brittany called 911 and Todd was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Brittany told the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department that Todd became violent after she agreed to let him sleep on her couch that night. She said Todd raped her twice that night, at one point knocking her unconscious. A rape crisis center report describes 33 wounds on Brittany’s body, including bite marks on her neck and chin. A toxicology report found that Todd had methamphetamine and alcohol in his system.

The trouble for Brittany began when Chris investigators he shot Todd, and then the next day Brittany said she was responsible for his death.

Brittany Smith was arrested for murder.

After her arrest, Brittany had a nervous breakdown at the Jackson County Jail. Her mother said that Brittany’s mental health quickly declined because she did not receive proper treatment for the PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] she had been diagnosed with after the rape. 

Brittany spent over two months in jail, and four months in a mental institution. Finally, she was appointed an attorney by the state named James Mick, who represented Brittany during a March 2018 preliminary hearing in which Alabama Circuit Court Judge Don Word heard testimony about Todd’s alleged rapes of Brittany. Judge Word, however, found that there was probable cause to charge Brittany with murder and sent the case to the grand jury where Jason Pierce, the District Attorney, obtained a murder indictment. 

During the hearing, the lead investigator for the sheriff’s department testified that the bruises on Brittany were not consistent with her statement that Todd tried to choke her to death and break her neck on the side of the bed because, he said, “Honestly, I would have thought there would be more [bruises].”

The murder indictment against Brittany Smith came despite the fact that Alabama has a ‘Stand Your Ground’, which, in Alabama, allows for the use of fatal force in several circumstances, including if a person thinks an attacker may kill them or if the attacker has kidnapped or raped someone. 

Victor Revill, an Alabama criminal defense attorney who specializes in Stand Your Ground cases, said  Brittany’s case was …

“‘Stand Your Ground’ all day. That situation is one of the reasons why this law is in place. If her brother was saving her from her kidnapper or her rapist and then kidnapper is trying to fight her brother, in her situation you have the right to defend yourself and you have the right to defend the other person as well.”

Two years after the attack, Brittany Smith finally had her ‘Stand Your Ground’ hearing and this week she lost, and now faces life in prison.

In her ruling, Judge Jenifer Holt wrote that Brittany’s use of deadly force was not demonstrably justified because she doubted that Brittany had reason to believe that Todd was about to use deadly physical force, assault, burglary, rape, or sodomy when she shot him.

Yes, she said that; despite the fact that Todd did assault Brittany—she had thirty-three wounds on her body—and despite the fact that Brittany said Todd was choking her brother when she fired the gun.

The ‘Stand Your Ground’ hearing was held in Scottsboro, Alabama—a county with double the state average of aggravated assaults per capita—and began with testimony from Jeanine Suermann, a sexual-assault nurse examiner who saw Brittany the morning after the rape.

Suermann said Brittany’s wounds were consistent with having been bitten … strangled with two hands around her neck … and assaulted with “a lot of force.” She listed bruises to Brittany’s neck, her breasts, her arms, legs, and head, and pointed out in photographs, the petechiae, the discolored patches that indicate the use of extreme pressure, along Brittany’s hairline and neck. Suermann also testified that, during the examination, Brittany described waking up “with no clothes in a puddle of urine” after having tried to fight back.

“[I] scratched him everywhere I could. He was going to kill me.”

When Jason Pierce, the DA, cast doubt on whether Brittany had actually been raped, because there was no definitive sample of Todd’s semen, Jeanine Suermann testified that said was common in sexual-assault cases.

Still, Judge Jenifer Holt cited this detail in her decision, saying that she did not believe the evidence was consistent with sexual assault. She then cited a 911 call in which Brittany said that she had not been raped, though Brittany later said she had been too ashamed to admit it.

When Jason Pierce questioned whether Brittany had truly feared for her life, pointing out that Todd had no weapon on him, she said:

“But he had his hands. His penis. His mouth. You saw the thirty-three wounds on my body.”

But there was the fact that the Chris McCallie originally told police that he’d shot Todd; he says he only did so because he believed a woman would not get a fair trial in Jackson County.

And that appears to be true. Judge Jenifer Holt wrote that her decision was influenced by the fact that Brittany had given “inconsistent accounts of the events surrounding Todd’s death.” 

Even in court, with Jeanine Suermann’s findings, and with photos of Brittany’s injuries splashed across a TV screen, it was clear that mere documentation of the violence wasn’t enough.

When Ron Smith, Brittany’s lawyer, showed a note Brittany had slipped to that store clerk that night, Judge Holt argued that Brittany had multiple opportunities to call police.

Ron Smith attempted to call witnesses to testify about Todd’s violent history, which included over eighty arrests, at least half a dozen of which were for domestic violence, against multiple women. Todd’s ex-wife, Paige Parker, says she was “beaten and raped and sodomized for years” by Todd before she got an order of protection. One witness, a woman who worked as a dispatcher for the Stevenson Police Department, testified that, in 2009, Todd had shoved her against a desk in her office and tried to tear off her shirt. A second witness, a man who grew up with Todd, told the court of the bruises he’d seen on women he believed Todd had hit.

Jason Pierce asked no questions about any of that, but he did ask that man about the necklace he wore. The man said:

“I’m into witchcraft [but] I don’t see how that’s relevant, my religion.”

Both testimonies were ultimately thrown out, after Pierce argued that bad-character evidence was not admissible.

Ron Smith asserted that Brittany’s actions were clear self-defense:

“She believed Todd Smith was going to cause serious injury to herself or her brother. He was told to leave. He did not leave. He unlawfully remained.”

In Alabama unlawfully remaining is the very definition of burglary, so Ron Smith argued that if sexual assault would not convince the judge that Todd had been a threat, perhaps an argument of burglary would.

Now, with Brittany’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ hearing denied, her lawyers will file a writ of mandamus to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, a long-shot request to the court to order the judge to reverse her decision. If they lose that, they can request the same order from the Alabama Supreme Court. If she loses both, Brittany will go to trial, likely back in Jackson County, before the same judge again.

Alabama. And yet it’s not just Alabama; it’s this whole country where women, and people of color, are treated differently, and indifferently, by law enforcement and the judicial system.

A woman, with thirty-three wounds on her body, who told her mother, brother, and a stranger she was raped by a man high on drugs and alcohol, is the criminal in America.

The New Yorker

The Appeal