SALT LAKE CITY — Elizabeth Smart waited more than eight years for the word she heard Friday.
“Guilty,” the court clerk said, after a federal jury deliberated five hours to convict street preacher Brian David Mitchell of snatching Smart from her bed, at knifepoint in the dead of night, and forcing sex on her while he held her captive for nine months.
Smart smiled as the verdict was read, while a bedraggled, bearded Mitchell sat at the defense table, singing hymns with his hands before his chest, as if in prayer.
“I hope that not only is this an example that justice can be served in America but that it is possible to move on after something terrible has happened,” Smart said after she walked arm-in-arm with her mother through a crush of media.
It was a dramatic end to a tale that captured the nation’s attention since she disappeared in June 2002: a 14-year-old girl mysteriously taken from her home, the intense search and her eventual discovery walking Salt Lake City’s streets with her captors.
Smart, now 23, flew back from her Mormon mission in Paris to take the stand, and recount her “nine months of hell.”
“The beginning and the end of this story is attributable to a woman with extraordinary courage and extraordinary determination, and that’s Elizabeth Smart,” federal prosecutor Carlie Christensen said outside the courthouse. “She did it with candor and clarity and a truthfulness that I think moved all of us.”
Smart described in excruciating detail how she woke up one night to the feel of a cold, jagged knife at her throat and being whisked away by Mitchell to his camp in the foothills near the family’s Salt Lake City home.
Within hours of the kidnapping, she testified, she was forced into a polygamous marriage with him. She was tethered to a metal cable and subjected to near-daily rapes while being forced to use alcohol and drugs.
The five-week trial turned on the question of Mitchell’s mental health.
The thinly built, gray-haired Mitchell was routinely removed from the courtroom after loudly singing hymns and Christmas carols and taken to another room to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit TV. He kept his eyes closed in court and never spoke to anyone, including his attorneys.
His attorneys did not dispute that he kidnapped Smart but wanted him to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Such a verdict would have sent him to a prison mental hospital.
Jurors did not buy the insanity defense, finding him guilty of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor across state lines for the purposes of illegal sex. The sex charge was based on Mitchell’s taking her for five of the nine months to California.
“It’s real!” father Ed Smart said on his way out of the packed courtroom, giving a thumbs up. The comment echoed what he told a crowd gathered around a church March 13, 2003, confirming that his daughter had been found.
Mitchell could face up to life in prison when he is sentenced May 25. However, a judge also could impose an unspecified, lesser sentence, prosecutors said.
The case was delayed for years after Mitchell was declared mentally incompetent in state court. Federal prosecutors later stepped in and took the case to trial.
