Minor Smith is known to his friends as Smitty. He’s been a prisoner here in Virginia for more than 50 years and is now a resident of Deerfield – a correctional center for seniors with health problems.
We spoke with him seven years ago, when he was only 71. He explained that as a much younger man he was broke and unemployed, so he decided to rob a small grocery store in Charlottesville. He hoped no one would recognize him, but as he approached the clerk things went wrong.
“When I walked up to the counter, he said, ‘Aren’t you Minor Smith?’ And when he said that I panicked," Smith recalls. 'I jerked the gun out, put my finger on the trigger and started firing. I shot in the candy bars and cigarettes and one bullet went out the window, and I shot him four times.”
He died, and Smith was sentenced to life in prison. Now blind, he’s taught other inmates to read braille, written a memoire and more than a hundred poems, including this one – about a trip to see his girlfriend, catching a ride from a trucker.
I flagged him down outside of Bluefield, headed for Rocky Gap. We arrived there about dawn on Monday morning without a mishap.
An elderly lady told me that Jennifer’s house was just behind hers. I found her, seated on the front porch, listening to kittens' purrs.
I was in no condition to make love or to give her anything to keep. My whim was that she would unlock the door and let me get some sleep.
You might expect a guy like that to be paroled. After all, the parole board’s website says its mission is to free those inmates whose release is compatible with public safety, and Smith seems an unlikely candidate for future crimes, but he’s been turned down for parole more than 30 times. Under a new law that took effect in July, the board was supposed to explain its reasons for refusing parole -- offering individualized assessments, but for Minor Smith and many others, it simply cites the seriousness of an inmate’s crime in refusing to release.
“We call that rubber stamping in here – when you just offer the same excuses over and over again,” says Abdul-Mu'min Marron, a man serving 55 years for robbery and illegal use of a weapon.
At the age of 16 he was charged with killing a neighbor who, he says, abused him, but he took a plea deal to avoid the death penalty.
“My lawyers kept telling me if I go to trial they’re going to kill me, and they told my mother this, they told my youth pastor this, so that’s why I was coerced into saying what they told me to say.”
That plea cost him the right to appeal. Now, at the age of 43, he wants a chance to make his case directly to the parole board, and the new law allows prisoners being considered for parole to attend a public meeting of the board in person or through video conference. Marron says he never got an invitation.
“The parole board did not meet with me when they reviewed my case!” he complains.
By law, the parole board is supposed to hold a public meeting when conducting a final deliberation and vote, so we hoped to review minutes from the meeting where Marron’s fate was decided.
Instead, a staffer told us such meetings were only necessary if the board intended to parole someone. If not, she explained, members would vote electronically on an individual basis with no meeting or debate and no transcript.
We also searched, in vain, for records involving Terrence Vaughn, a 44-year-old inmate who committed a crime at the age of 18. The parole board told him he needed to serve more of his sentence – noting he had only done five years. In fact, Vaughn has been behind bars for more than 20, but we could find no official account of his case and no official correction.
The board did post a list of more than 200 cases it reviewed in October and November. Not one of the prisoners involved was paroled.
