Elizabeth Smart was not afraid to face Brian Mitchell in her first testimony detailing her 2002 abduction.
In fact, her father said, she wanted the man who allegedly kept her tethered to a tree in the Utah woods muzzled and forced to listen to her testimony.
Mitchell was in court Thursday for a competency hearing, but Smart never saw him because U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ordered him removed from the court when he ignored requests to stop singing and disrupting the proceedings. He watched via a closed-circuit camera from another room.
“She actually wanted to face him,” Ed Smart said. “I think she asked [U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman] if he could be muzzled and have to sit there and watch it.”
Tolman, standing alongside Smart’s father after Thursday’s hearing in Salt Lake City, confirmed the 21-year-old woman’s request: “She did ask me whether or not [Mitchell] got to see that testimony and hear that testimony, and I indicated to her, to her relief, that he was there in a room with the audio and video and had nothing else to do but listen.”
Mitchell is accused of abducting Smart from the bedroom of her Salt Lake City, Utah, home in June 2002. She testified that she was kept captive in Utah and California until March 2003, when she was found walking down a street in Sandy, Utah, with Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee.
Smart said that, during those nine months, no 24-hour period passed without Mitchell being able to rape her.
Public defender Robert Steele says Mitchell is mentally ill, but Tolman said he believes that Mitchell “has attempted to fool or to deceive the system.”
Source/Full Story: CNN.com
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