Posted on 06/12/2006 2:34:06 PM PDT by SmithL
MARTINEZ - The prosecutor in Susan Polk's murder trial told jurors Monday that despite hearing months of testimony about family dynamics, they need to base their ultimate decision on what they believed happened the night Felix Polk died.
"It's still going to come down to what you think happened in that pool house," deputy district attorney Paul Sequeira said to the jury in a courtroom overflowing into the foyer with onlookers.
Sequeira halted his closing argument at each of the 14 motions for a mistrial that Polk requested as he spoke. After Polk gives her closing this afternoon, the jury will begin deliberating whether she committed murder, manslaughter or should be acquitted on grounds of self-defense.
Polk, 48, is accused of murdering her husband in 2002 during their bitter divorce. She testified that she was defending herself against 70-year-old Felix Polk after he attacked her and his death resulted from a heart attack after being stabbed.
The defendant, who is representing herself at trial, has said she survived decades of an abusive marriage. The couple met when she was a teenager and he was her therapist.
Sequeira said Polk's story of how her husband died has changed over time and fails to fit the physical evidence. He often paced around his podium, his hands in and out of his pockets and looking over his reading glasses directly at jurors.
He said Polk left the fight with barely any wounds.
Sequeira held a knife in a stabbing position at his shoulder, within three paces of the jury box.
"How in the world does she get her hand in here and get the knife away?" he asked, alluding to Polk's recounting of grabbing the weapon away from her husband.
Throughout nearly the entire two hours t Sequeira spoke, Polk flipped through papers on her desk with one hand and took notes with the other.
Sequeira touched on evidence the jury has heard throughout trial -- from Polk's son Gabriel saying his mother had discussed ways of killing her husband to her trying to cover up the crime after deciding not to tell police that she was defending herself.
The jury heard different versions of what family life was like in the Polk household, Sequeira said. In some, Felix Polk was a "brute." In others, he told friends he feared for his life.
Sequeira said he cannot prove with precision the nuances of the couple's relationship, and admitted that Felix Polk was wrong to become romantically involved in his patient.
The basics of their marriage, he said, were comparable to a job the prosecutor said he worked as a boy on a farm, piling bales of hay.
"If the bottom layer, your foundation, is crooked, the stack is never straight," he told the jury. "This stack probably never had the chance to be straight."
The evidence does not show she was trying to defend herself, he said.
"Her relationship with her husband deteriorated to a point where she hated him," Sequeira said moments before the judge recessed for lunch.
"That didn't give her the right to decide to end this bitter divorce by murdering her husband. She's lied to you folks and she's committed murder in the first degree," he concluded.
Polk is expected to begin her closing argument at 1:30 p.m.
"She's lied to you, folks. She's lied to you all along," prosecutor Paul Sequeira told jurors in a Martinez courtroom, rejecting Polk's claim that she stabbed her husband, Felix Polk, 70, in self-defense after he assaulted her in the pool house of their Orinda home and he died of a heart attack in the struggle.
"There's no question who the winner is in this struggle," he said, showing jurors photographs of Felix Polk's body covered with numerous wounds along with photos of the defendant that showed her with only a slight bruise near her eye.
And, he noted, Polk has offered several accounts of what happened that night in October 2002, first telling police she didn't kill him, then saying she killed in self-defense and then offering various stories about the particulars to reporters.
"You pick a story," Sequeira told the jury. "None of them fit."
Polk, 48, made several objections today as Sequeira gave his closing summation, claiming he was misstating the evidence. "This trial is nothing but a complete farce," she said at one point.
Polk, who will present her closing argument this afternoon, repeatedly sought a mistrial on the grounds of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge Laurel Brady denied those motions. . . . .
I'm sure she is guilty, but do you remember why she fired Daniel Horowitz? She has a fool for a client.
Yes, Polk says that Horowitz confessed to her, that he had a role in the death of his wife, Pamela Vitale, and conspired to to blame Scott Dyleski for that murder.
She really is a nut job.
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