Posted on 05/16/2006 3:29:01 PM PDT by SmithL
MARTINEZ - Jurors strained their necks and the prosecutor stood up Tuesday to watch as murder defendant Susan Polk lay on the courtroom floor to reenact the fight that led to the death of her husband.
"Couldn't he impale himself on the knife and get his injuries on his arm?" Polk asked a pathologist looking down at her from the witness stand.
"You're beginning to get into more detail than I can assess," replied Texas-based pathologist John Cooper, who is testifying as a defense witness.
Cooper's testimony came after Susan Polk told the judge that she intends to start testifying in her own defense Tuesday afternoon. She has said that her testimony would take the form of a narrative.
Cooper has testified that her husband, Felix Polk, did not die from knife wounds or from a blow to the head, but as a result of a heart attack during a fight. He also has testified that Felix Polk was most likely the aggressor in the fight.
Orinda resident Susan Polk, 48, is charged with murder in the 2002 killing of her 70-year-old therapist husband, whom she met as a teenage patient. She says she killed him in self-defense after an abusive marriage.
Through her questions to Cooper on Tuesday, Polk outlined her version of what calls a struggle and what prosecutors call a premeditated crime.
Polk laid out a scenario of the fight, asking Cooper if her version of events could have occurred.
Cooper agreed with Polk that her husband most likely attacked her, and that she could have fallen to the ground and then defended by kicking him in the groin. If Felix Polk had a knife, the kick could have stunned him enough that he would have loosened his grip on the knife, allowing her to grab it.
"That's not hard to understand at all," Cooper said.
Cooper testified that Felix Polk's head injury occurred after his heart attack, when he fell to the ground.
If Polk had hit her husband on the back of the head with a blunt object while he was standing, blood would have covered his back, he said. But his back was clean of blood.
"It's just that simple," he said.
Polk issued few insults and accusations Tuesday morning, and the prosecutor even cracked a few jokes.
In one instance, as Polk questioned Cooper about whether it is possible to stun a man by kicking him in the groin, she asked, "Don't men have a particularly more vulnerable area of their bodies that women don't have?"
"So stipulated," prosecutor Paul Sequeira quickly interrupted, eliciting laughter.
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Perhaps the defense should have rehearsed this first!
Can't make this stuff up bump!
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