Elmer Smith: For cool, unfazed Gosnell, just another strictly business day

KERMIT GOSNELL's expression never changed as his lawyer, Jack McMahon, reminded a judge that his client may be facing death by injection.

McMahon pressed a spirited but futile argument with Common Pleas Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes at a status hearing Wednesday. She was polite but firm in rejecting his plea for a preliminary hearing.

"We thought it would be helpful in a potential death-penalty case to cross-examine some of these witnesses," McMahon said, in conceding the point.

Gosnell, sitting ramrod- straight at the end of a row of co-defendants who had been co-workers in his West Philadelphia clinic, appeared to be unfazed.

Death by injection has been a term of art for him.

Three hours earlier, I had received a letter from Gosnell that included a description of the injection procedure doctors can use to kill a fetus.

"The procedure," Gosnell wrote "is entitled Intrauterine Fetal Demise and performed with direct visualization by ultrasound.

"It is an established medical technique, done on the day prior to the abortion."

Death by injection is an established technique in the American justice system, too, done with the same clinical detachment as the procedure Gosnell described in his letter to me.

"The district attorney will be considering many factors," the D.A.'s director of communications, Tasha Jamerson, said in a written answer to my question about the death penalty. Those factors include "the circumstances surrounding the crime, the age of the victims, the number of victims, age of the defendant and Gosnell's background."

All very orderly. If this, then that.

I was reminded of a line from "The Godfather": "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business."

Gosnell's business was performing illegal abortions and pushing prescription pills, according to the conclusions of a grand jury that inspected his clinic, at 38th and Lancaster, and heard eight months of gruesome testimony from 63 witnesses.

"This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women," its report begins. Gosnell, the jurors said, was a "butcher of women" who "regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors."

The practices described in digusting detail in that 261-page, illustrated report were nothing like the "established procedure" Gosnell described to me.

This "butcher of women" sounded nothing like the Kermit Gosnell I had known when we were kids at the West Branch YMCA.

But a lot can happen in 50 years.

Gosnell wants us to believe that the "real" Kermit Gosnell is the guy I last spoke with 50 years ago, not the fiend described in the grand-jury report.

"I'm still the same [man] you knew," he wrote in a personal note.

He cited the name of a former patient who he said would describe her "irrefutable experience of my caring and competence."

In the last two weeks, I've heard from a number of people who have risen to his defense. So far, none of them has been very convincing.

Their experiences with him have been very different from the grand jury's report. But they don't negate the grand jury's horrible allegations.

Gosnell's letter was a personal testimony. He said that he has been called upon before to answer unfair charges. He cited an anonymous complaint that had prompted "a comprehensive review of 1,067 surgical abortion procedures" that he had performed.

"There were no infections," he claimed "and only one possibility of a minor complication."

Even if it's true, it does not even begin to address the allegations against him this time.

He will get that chance in a trial that could last for months and include the publicized testimony of people whose horror stories will challenge any jury's objectivity.

If they convict, they will reconvene to decide whether Gosnell should live or die.

They would have to do that in a process as detached and clinical as intrauterine fetal demise.

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: www.philly.com/ElmerSmith