Week in Review : COURTS : Professor’s Admission Shocks Friends

When Richard L. Smith, a Cal State Fullerton philosophy professor, was arrested and charged with murdering his girlfriend’s ex-husband in 1984, his friends rallied behind him.

The support was not only moral but financial. More than 75 of them raised $75,000 for attorney fees and enough to post $200,000 bail. Some put up their houses as security. Some took him into their homes to live.

“It was my assumption from Day 1 that he was totally innocent,” said fellow professor Corrin Wood.

“The Richard Smith I’ve known is a responsible and conscientious person who is not a threat to anyone,” said Craig Ihara, chairman of the philosophy department when Smith was arrested.

That image was shattered during the third week of Smith’s trial when defense attorney Gary Proctor began to present his case. Smith originally had pleaded not guilty, but the defense strategy was that Smith had committed the murder while not sound of mind.

Defense psychiatrists testified that Smith is a chronic paranoid schizophrenic whose contact with reality is very poor and who often lives in a fantasy world.

The revelation shocked Smith’s friends.

Wood withdrew the equity in her house she had lent as security to Smith. “I brought him into my house and I had my grandchildren over, but that is something I wouldn’t have done if I’d had any inkling at all that he’d killed the man,” Wood said.

Others stuck by Smith. “The core of the person I knew, a very compassionate person, that’s still there. It’s not a facade,” Ihara said.