MAYS LANDING, N.J. — After a week in court, attorneys delivered closing arguments Tuesday in the child abuse trial of Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small Sr.
Defense lawyers for Small, a 51-year-old Democrat who was reelected this year, said the allegations that he and his wife had abused their teenage daughter multiple times in late 2023 and early 2024 were false.
“We are not guilty,” his attorney, Louis Barbone, told jurors in New Jersey Superior Court.
Small faces charges of endangering the welfare of child, aggravated assault, making terroristic threats, and witness tampering. He has denied the charges, and testifying in his own defense last week, he told jurors he “would do anything to protect” the girl and said he did not strike her with a broom as she has alleged.
More than 40 people testified on behalf of Small in the trial’s final days. It comes as Atlantic City ends the year in struggles both political and financial.
Prosecutors say Small not only struck his daughter but also attempted to cover up the abuse as he and his wife, La’Quetta, grew increasingly in conflict with the teen over a relationship with a boy they did not approve of.
They said he punched her and beat her with a belt in addition to hitting her with a broom, and later told her to “twist up” her account of the incidents to investigators to minimize his involvement.
“Violence is not a solution,” Assistant Prosecutor Elizabeth Fischer told the panel. “Abuse is not parenting.”
But Small’s lawyer, Barbone, told jurors prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence to make their case and said they had inappropriately interceded in a private, family matter in the Small household.
“Why have we taken this man’s life and made a spectacle of it?” Barbone asked. “Because they can.”
He scoffed at prosecutors’ idea that the teen had been intimidated by her father’s political power, calling the trial “extortion by the child.”
The girl, Barone said, had lied about her injuries to both doctors and investigators, conspiring with her boyfriend to secretly record her father and compromise him.
Much of the attorney’s attention fell on the January 2024 incident in which Smalls’ daughter said he struck her multiple times in the head with a broom during an argument over her attending the Atlantic City Peace Walk.
Barbone said the girl had also been holding a butter knife and that as the mayor struggled with her over the broom, the teen fell and hit her head.
The attorney said the teen then exaggerated her injuries, and he said the bristle side of a broom couldn’t do damage. He told jurors to look no further than the testimony of the girl’s nurse, who could not rule that the teen suffered a concussion as she contended.
And Barbone returned to the topic of Small’s daughter’s sexually explicit messaging with her boyfriend, which prosecutors called a “shining ball in the corner” meant to distract jurors from both the teen’s testimony of the alleged abuse and the photos of her bruises.
Barbone said the conflicts began after the Smalls discovered their daughter had sneaked the boy into the family home and had sex without their knowledge. He later displayed an emotionally charged text chain between the girl and her mother in which the teen threatens to go off birth control.
Meanwhile, Fischer, the prosecutor, asked jurors to remember the “truth” of what Small’s daughter had endured. .
Fischer said the teen had been brave to testify against her father — arguably the most powerful figure in Atlantic City government — as well as her mother, who is the superintendent of Atlantic City Public Schools. La’Quetta Small also faces a child endangerment charge in a case scheduled for trial in January.
It was “the most difficult thing a person can do,” Fischer said of the girl’s decision to testify against her parents, giving her little incentive to lie.
The prosecutor said a nurse who tended to the girl’s injuries had diagnosed the teen with a head injury, and that it was impossible to tell if she was concussed through a CT scan alone.
And a pediatrician who specializes in child abuse testified that the girl’s injuries were “nonaccidental,” Fischer added.
Prosecutors said the girl first reported the abuse to her principal, Candace Days-Chapman. They say Days-Chapman, who previously served as Marty Small’s campaign manager, did not file a report with child welfare authorities. She instead told Smalls herself, and staff at the school only learned of the abuse after the teen reported it a second time after watching a mental health presentation. Chapman was later charged with official misconduct and related crimes.
Fischer, her voice swelling with emotion, expressed disbelief that Small had allowed his attorney to characterize his daughter as both an “animal” and “Tasmanian devil” in describing their conflicts at home.
“This is offensive at its highest level,” she said.
And she told jurors that some of those who testified on behalf of the mayor had strong ties to Atlantic City government and stood to gain from the mayor’s success. And in the end, she said, they had not witnessed the conflicts between Small and his daughter.
“Character,” the prosecutor said, ”is how you act when no one is watching you.“
