Mary Montgomery has been reduced to an afterthought in the Sean Casey imbroglio.

Casey ran her down and sped away, leaving her dead on Harding Avenue. Eight years later, Sean Casey's champions regard her as inconvenient detritus in a narrative that casts poor Sean as the victim of the cops, judges, his therapist, even his own lawyer.

Casey, drunk at the wheel, came speeding through Miami Beach in his BMW 325i on March 11, 2001, striking Montgomery with such force that the retiree's body dented the fender and smashed his windshield. Another driver, after swerving to avoid a collision with the BMW, saw the impact. ``She went up in the air and packages, bags, clothes, everything was . . . it was like a garbage can . . . when you run into a garbage can everything just gets thrown up in the air.''

Miami Beach police soon discovered Casey's damaged BMW ditched six blocks from his apartment. They found groceries from Mary Montgomery's Publix bag strewn inside the abandoned car. When police knocked on his door a short time later, Casey, still drunk, could only recall clubbing until sunrise. After that, he claimed he suffered a very convenient blackout. His car must have been stolen, he suggested. (Though shards of the broken windshield were found on Casey's shirt.) Maybe someone slipped him a roofie.

RELENTLESS CAMPAIGN

FreeSeanCasey.org, part of a relentless campaign to overturn his DUI manslaughter conviction, hints that even if Sean did plow over Mary Montgomery, it was her fault. The website dismisses her as a ``71-year-old somewhat overweight woman with emphysema and high blood pressure carrying heavy groceries.'' Don't blame Sean if some fat old woman can't jump clear of oncoming traffic.

But the most blame has been heaped on his attorney, Milton Hirsch, who Casey and his mother claim advised him to jump bail and flee the country and later bullied him into accepting the plea deal that gave him a dozen years in prison.

It's a preposterous argument, despite inexplicable support from the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Hirsch had filed some 30 motions, fighting to keep Casey out of jail, but when the trial loomed in 2004, the evidence remained overwhelming. Casey, plainly guilty, fled the country. After Chile extradited the fugitive in 2006, Casey accepted the plea deal.

Now he wants a new trial, claiming that both Hirsch and his therapist convinced him to abscond. He offered tapes, illegally recorded by either him or his mother (they've both invoked the Fifth Amendment) that might or might not support those allegations. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Judge John Thornton decides today whether or not to unseal the recordings.

JUMPING BOND

But either way, who can buy the notion that Casey, 36, a program organizer with the Inter American Press Association, with a masters from Georgetown University, was too dense to grasp the ramifications of jumping bond, no matter what his lawyer said? Why would he continue to retain Hirsch, the alleged purveyor of such questionable advice, after his extradition? Why didn't he raise reservations about Hirsch or the deal during the laborious questioning from the judge at his sentencing?

And, lest we forget, what about justice for Mary Montgomery?

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