HOUSTON -- Susan Wright, the Houston wife convicted of stabbing her husband about 200 times, is seeking a new trial. Her new attorney claims she was "denied effective assistance of counsel" and is asking a judge to re-hear the case.
The trial was one of the most memorable in Houston courtroom history and will be remembered most for the actions of prosecutor Kelly Siegler. The veteran prosecutor rolled a bed into the courtroom and climbed atop an assistant to recreate the fatal stabbing of Wright's husband Jeff.
Wright has maintained that she stabbed her husband 193 times in the chest and head, all in self-defense. Now she is serving 25 years in prison for murder.
"They dropped the ball," attorney Brian Wice said of Wright's former defense counsel. "They are young, well-meaning, inexperienced lawyers who got steam rolled by the best prosecutor I've seen in about three decades. And it showed."
Wice alleges that Wright's attorneys failed to call a witness in the field of Battered Women's Syndrome and failed to better focus on her late husband's alleged abusive nature. The attorney plans to bring in Jeff Wright's former fiance to establish he was abusive.
"She will testify as to the living hell that her life with Jeff Wright was," said Wice. "What that does (is the) one thing that the defense didn't do or wouldn't do and that's bring somebody in who knows from first-hand knowledge what a serial abuser Jeff Wright was."
11 News legal expert Gerald Treece, though, called Wice's motion, "a Hail Mary pass after the game is over."
"The sad truth of the matter is that in criminal law the last desperate argument or the Hail Mary pass is always that the lawyers were ineffective and it has always been true," said Treece. "But the statistics show that those types of Hail Mary passes seldom get completed."
