A South Carolina mother who killed her two young sons in 1994 by strapping them in car seats and rolling her vehicle into a lake has been denied parole after 30 years behind bars.
Susan Smith, 53, appeared via video feed from prison on Wednesday and pleaded with a seven-member parole board for her freedom three decades after the deaths of Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months.
“First, I want to say how very sorry I am,” Smith said as she broke down crying. “I know what I did was horrible and I’d do anything to go back and change it.”
Smith went on to say that she has made a lot of dumb choices in prison but has learned from her mistakes.
“I am a Christian and God is a big part of my life and I know he has forgiven me,” she said. “I just ask that you show the same kind of mercy and yeah I guess that’s it.”
But it was not enough to sway the board and they denied her request for parole.
A jury convicted Smith of murder in 1995 but decided not to sentence her to death. Under state law at the time, she is eligible for a parole hearing every two years now that she has spent 30 years behind bars.
Smith’s ex-husband and father of the children, David Smith, vowed to be at the parole hearings for his slain sons every two years going forward to “ensure that their death doesn’t go in vain.”
“I’m here to advocate on Michael and Alex’s behalf as their father,” he told the parole board. “God gives us free choice. She made this choice. This wasn’t a tragic mistake. She purposely meant to end their lives.”
As for the 30 years she has spent in prison, he said: “Ultimately to me that’s only 15 years per child. Her own children. It’s just not enough.”
Smith made international headlines in October 1994 when she said she was carjacked late by a Black man who then drove away with her sons inside.
The claims by Smith, who is white, played into a centuries-old racist trope of Black men being a danger to white women and stoked concerns about crime that were prevalent in 1990s America and remain so today, the Associated Press reported.
For nine days, Smith and her husband pleaded with the public for the safe return of their children. But the entire time, the boys were in Smith’s car at the bottom of nearby John D. Long Lake.
Smith ultimately confessed to letting her car roll down a boat ramp and into the lake.
A re-creation by investigators showed it took six minutes for the Mazda to dip below the surface, while cameras inside the vehicle showed water pouring in through the vents and steadily rising.
The boys’ bodies were found dangling upside-down in their car seats, one tiny hand pressed against a window,
Prosecutors have said Smith killed her sons because a man she was having an affair with at the time said that he did not want children.
Smith and her husband were legally separated at the time of the murders, but David joined forces with Smith to find their sons. Everything changed when she confessed to killing their children.
A judge granted their divorce in May 1995, a couple of months before her trial began.
“I am not the monster society thinks I am,” she later wrote in a letter to The State newspaper in 2015. “I am far from it.”
“Something went very wrong that night,” she added. “I was not myself. I was a good mother and I loved my boys. There was no motive as it was not even a planned event. I was not in my right mind.”
Smith’s attorneys claimed she was suffering a mental breakdown and intended to die alongside her children, but saved herself at the last moment, according to The New York Times.
The trial lasted less than a week, and, after less than two-and-a-half hours of deliberation, the jury found Smith guilty on two counts of first-degree murder.
Smith’s time behind bars over the past 30 years has been mired in controversy — from having sex with prison guards to violating policies and chatting up a number of obsessed suitors on the outside.
She was hit with two infractions for having sex with prison guards in 2000 and then was disciplined at least five times between 2010 and 2017 for issues including self-mutilation and drug use, People reported.
