After his conviction, Smith went to a maximum-security prison with adult men. But this week, he returned to court, hoping for a second chance. For years, his family and friends—and even Washington’s parents—have argued that Smith was unfairly punished, and that he should not spend decades locked up for a police officer’s actions. At a resentencing hearing on Tuesday, the same judge who heard Smith’s original case considered whether to shorten his term. “He needs to come home,” Vernice Washington, Washington’s mother, said before the hearing to Vice News, which published a documentary about the case last year. Smith’s new attorney, Leroy Maxwell, argues that the trial and conviction were unjust, and that the court should have taken Smith’s age into greater consideration.
Smith’s resentencing hearing has brought renewed attention to felony murder laws, which exist in most states, according to the Marshall Project, a criminal justice news outlet that has reported on them extensively. These laws disproportionately penalize young people, women, and Black people, and are used frequently in some jurisdictions: In Pennsylvania, for example, almost a quarter of people serving life without parole were convicted on such charges. No other country in the world has felony murder laws on the books.
Some states have reformed their laws, as the Marshall Project‘s Jamiles Lartey recently reported. After California amended its felony murder statute in 2018, hundreds of people had their sentences reduced. Colorado also lessened its maximum punishment for felony murder in 2021, to 48 years in prison, while Illinois reformed its law so that it wouldn’t apply when police kill someone. Lawmakers in Minnesota and Maryland are considering reforms, too. Kentucky and Hawaii have abolished felony murder.
Back in Alabama, Smith’s sentence was reduced once before. He originally received 65 years in prison—30 years for Washington’s death, and 35 for the burglary and theft. In 2019, a state appeals court shaved 10 years off that total because of a sentencing technicality, according to the Montgomery Advertiser, leaving him with 55 years to serve.
