During the three years that Brontina Smith’s son spent in Alabama’s Elmore County Jail awaiting trial, he packed about 50 pounds onto what had been a 135-pound frame.
“So, now, it’s not letting the jury see that they’re dealing with a child,” said the mother of LaKeith Smith, who was 15 in February 2015 when he and a group of boys were caught burglarizing a home just outside of Montgomery.
After a watchful neighbor called 9-1-1, Millbrook Police Department officers arrived. There was an exchange of gunfire, police said. An officer shot and killed A’Donte Washington, one of the boy burglars, and later was cleared of wrongdoing.
LaKeith Smith, under Alabama’s felony murder law allowing prosecutors to charge a person considered an accomplice to a crime, was faulted for his friend’s death. No evidence that the teen fired or possessed a gun was presented during the trial.
Smith, now 23, should never have been in that group of boys, his mother said, making trouble with them.
He also should not be serving a 55-year sentence in a maximum-security prison for, as the law defines it, being an accomplice to murder, she added. Her son, she said, was just a boy on that February day.
“Age does not matter when it comes to the judicial system. They will put you in an adult prison at the age of 14 or 15,” she said. “They will do that. They will throw you out there in a sea full of sharks.”
LaKeith Smith’s imprisonment — his initial 65-year sentence was reduced — results from the local district attorney’s decision to try him for violating a statute that, according to a March 2022 report from the Sentencing Project, exists in all but two states, Kentucky and Hawaii. The Sentencing Project researchers argue for the abolition of that statute, conceived in the 1700s. So do researchers at Sam Houston State and Roger Williams Universities, whose 2021 report, “Too Young for the Crime, Yet Old Enough to Do Life,” published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Law, examines the laws and legal proceedings surrounding juveniles charged with felony murder.
“Youth under the age of 18 years can be charged with felony murder even if they did not commit the killing or intend the death of the victim … “ wrote authors of the 2021 report. “ … [W]e identify how juveniles who did not commit the act of homicide and/or intend for the killing in a felony murder are sentenced to lengthy prison terms … [P]unishment terms of juveniles for felony murder should be viewed as unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.”
During a courtroom appeal of LaKeith Smith’s sentence, slated for Dec. 2, his Birmingham-based attorneys will similarly argue that the teen’s sentence violates that federal amendment’s ban against “cruel and unusual punishment.” His conviction should be erased, they will say, or, at a minimum, his sentence should be reconsidered in light of mitigating factors not presented in court previously.
Additionally, argues Smith’s lawyer, Leroy Maxwell Jr., holding LaKeith Smith responsible for murdering A’Donte Washington goes beyond what the federal murder statute was intended to do.
A coalition of volunteers backing Smith’s appeal posted an Instagram clip of him speaking from prison: “I want to thank you all for your support. The letters, shares, signatures … helped me a lot. The campaign, you all give me hope. Please keep showing your support and sharing my story. Help me get home to my family.”
A break-in and a fatally shot teen burglar
That February day seven years ago, Smith and four other boys broke into a house in Millbrook, a northern suburb of Montgomery, according to police. A Millbrook police officer’s body camera footage showed him encountering 16-year-old A’Donte Washington emerging from a fence bordering the house. The officer fired four shots. Three of them, according to an autopsy, hit the boy in the back of his forearm, back of his shoulder and back of his neck. A grand jury cleared the officer of wrongdoing. The footage showed the officer jumping onto the felled Washington, shouting, “Drop it! Drop it!”
“I look at the pain in my kids’ eyes, his brothers and sisters,” said the dead teen’s father, Andre Washington. “I look at the pain in their eyes every time I see them.”
Of the other boys also charged with felony murder in connection with A’Donte Washington’s death, three took plea deals saying they were guilty, and were sentenced to serve roughly half the amount of time that Smith eventually received. Because he was 14 and officially a youthful offender, another of the boys spent 14 months behind bars.
Smith was the only one who chose to argue his case in court. He lost. He’s been locked down at St. Clair Correctional Facility, where 28 violent deaths and 90 assaults were reported among 1,200 incarcerees from January through August of this year. An Equal Justice Initiative analysis concluded that Alabama’s state prisons are the nation’s deadliest.
“He tells me that somebody’s always dying, somebody’s always being stabbed, there’s always fights,” said Liliana Gonzalez, who leads the coalition working for Smith’s release.
Marked by a gun tragedy early on
Before he joined that group of boys, gun violence had already marked Smith’s life. His friend Jevonte Scott, 18, was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in the backyard of a Montgomery home in 2013. Smith was 14 at the time. The death shook him, said his mother, who also has two daughters. LaKeith, she said, is a mama’s boy. She loved going to his football games. She remains proud that he excelled at math in school. She misses the sound of his laughter, so infectious, she said, that it “elevates the room.”
Still, she acknowledges that her son had gotten himself into trouble. Except for A’Donte Washington, the boys had burglarized another house prior to the one where the cops caught them, police said. LaKeith Smith still faces robbery and kidnapping charges in connection with the earlier burglary.
But she questions why a 15-year-old Black boy doesn’t get the same kind of dispensation and milder treatment that many a white boy with the same arrests gets.
She was at work when she got a call from the Millbrook Police Department that she needed to come to the station for an urgent matter involving her son. At the station, a detective showed her a photo of a young man lying on the ground. She didn’t recognize him.
Minutes later, she caught sight of two young women with a baby as they entered, then exited, a rear door of the police station. They were distraught. “I immediately jumped into mama/auntie mode,” Smith said. “I followed them outside and I’m comforting them. I’m asking them, ‘Who can I call?’”
When she went back inside, the detective directed her toward the back of the station. There, she saw her son. She sat down beside him. Red mud was splattered on his white hoodie, blue jeans and white sneakers, she remembered. He was shaking.
The boys were breaking into houses, the detective said. He didn’t mention anything about what she later learned was A’Donte Washington’s dead body in that photo. When she asked her son who that was, he said that no one had died.
“He didn’t know,” she said.
Running from the scene, then surrendering
He’d proceeded to jump over the wooden fence of that burglarized home while bullets were punching holes in it, her son later explained to her. He’d fallen, failing to hurdle the fence on his first attempt.
Looking back, he’d seen A’Donte on the ground. But LaKeith thought he was surrendering, not shot, his mother said.
He made it over the fence and hid in some nearby woods as a helicopter buzzed overhead, searching for him and the others. He decided to surrender and came out of the woods, not thinking the matter was as serious as it would turn out to be, his mother said.
In the interrogation room, with his mother present, the detective said Smith had been in a shootout with police. He looked at his mother with an expression “like a deer in the headlights,” she said. That made her skeptical about the detective’s claims about a shootout. She asked if they had tested his hands for gunpowder residue.
“He told me that’s not something that is done in real life, that’s something that I only see on TV,” she said. (Though sometimes conducted, tests of gunpowder residue are not considered reliable by many forensic experts.)
He spoke to her as if she “knew nothing about how things work,” she said. It aggravated her. The detective ushered her outside the interrogation room. He said LaKeith would be sent to a juvenile facility and an attorney would be obtained for him. He said she could go home because the interview was over.
But the detectives continued to question him, her son later told her. They told him, lying, that his mother had gotten mad and stormed out, his mother said. It was the second time LaKeith was questioned without a parent or attorney present, the first being when police initially brought him into the station.
Charged as an adult, instead of a juvenile
A judge denied Smith’s attorney’s request that he be charged as a juvenile, instead, remanding him initially to a city-run jail for adults that is 100 miles north of Montgomery.
The Smith and Washington families had hoped that evidence about the history and character of the officer who killed A’Donte would be presented at the trial. A'Donte's father had hired a private investigator who learned information that he provided to LaKeith’s court-appointed attorney, Jennifer Holton, Brontina Smith said. That information wasn’t used when Holton cross-examined the officer, who was not named publicly. She said she wishes she’d asked Holton why.
Brontina Smith and Andre Washington dispute the police and prosecution claim that there was a shootout. The only shells recovered from the scene were those from the officers’ guns, and no evidence of gunpowder residue on any of the defendants’ hands was presented at trial, according to Washington.
He remembers the prosecution’s still-frame photo from the body camera footage of his son’s shooting. It was presented in court with a circle drawn around what appeared to be A’Donte’s hand at his side, which the prosecutor, C.J. Robinson, said held a gun that he was raising toward the officer who then shot him.
After two days of testimony, an all-white jury convicted LaKeith Smith of murder, burglary and two theft charges.
At his sentencing, Smith said, “I don't have time for this," while he waited in the courtroom for his case to be called, reported local news station WSFA. The judge overheard him and brought the comment up as he sentenced the teen.
"When I called the case earlier, you said you ain't got time for this. So, I didn't know if you had time for this now," Elmore County Judge Sibley Reynolds said.
Smith laughed and said he didn’t know Reynolds had heard him, according to WSFA.
"You just don't get it, do you?" Reynolds said. "He hasn't said I'm sorry yet. He hasn't acknowledged to this court that he shouldn't have done, shouldn't have come around — in fact, his attitude toward this court, and life in general, has been sour."
Brontina Smith told JJIE her son’s reaction was due to him feeling “on the spot.” He was 18, but his development should be considered arrested at 15 because he had been incarcerated since that age, she said. He hadn’t continued any formal education, nor had he been taught how to conduct himself in a courtroom, she said.
The judge gave her son back-to-back sentences: 30 years for murder, 15 for burglary and 10 years for each theft charge.
“I don’t think Mr. Smith will be smiling long when he gets to prison,” prosecutor Robinson told the Montgomery Advertiser. “We are very pleased with this sentence … [I]t will be a long time before he comes up for even the possibility for parole, at least 20 to 25 years.”
Recalling that day, Robinson told JJIE he was, nevertheless, surprised by Reynolds’ ruling, based on Alabama’s felony murder law. “I was shocked when he announced the sentence was 65 years. I was surprised, I really was.”
Also, Robinson said Smith should have been apprised of all the possible outcomes of a trial. Defense attorney Holton explained to her client that he’d been offered a 25-year prison sentence in exchange for pleading guilty, Brontina Smith said. But he had not killed anyone, he reminded Holton, and he chose not to say that he did.
“This case was the case that’s not like all the other ones, clearly,” added Robinson, saying that he chose to levy the felony murder charges in the view that A’Donte Washington was a victim as well as a perpetrator.
“His life’s got value and he can be a victim of felony murder as well. I felt like it was hypocritical of me to look at that scenario and say, ‘Oh, he was an actor in the crime, he’s the one that got killed, he had it coming,’” Robinson said.
Prosecutors often use the charge of manslaughter against people who kill carelessly or negligently, said Buffalo Law School professor Guyora Binder, author of the book “Felony Murder.”
Felony murder statutes allow prosecutors to ignore the issue of deliberate intent, which usually is a key factor in determining the culpability of someone whose actions are deemed to have caused a death, Binder added.
“If you make every manslaughter into a murder, that destroys your grading system,” Binder said.
Prosecutor Robinson, Smith’s supporters say, stretched the language of the federal murder statute as he angled to win a conviction.
Smith’s attorney, Leroy Maxwell, told JJIE that Robinson’s argument, according to Alabama statute, considers the police officer who shot A’Donte Washington a “participant” in the “course of and in furtherance of the crime” or in the “immediate flight therefrom.”
Smith’s legal team is challenging that in its upcoming appeal, called a Rule 32 motion, which would have his conviction and his sentence challenged in a trial court. Maxwell said the appeal’s strongest argument is its criticism of Holton’s “grossly ineffective” defense at trial.
He said his team has brought in a psychologist and a mitigation expert who have provided “an overflow of information that should have been presented to the court,” including an expert’s refutation of the prosecution’s claim that rigor-mortis froze A’Donte’s Washington’s hand in the position of firing the gun that was recovered from the ground next to his body. Robinson relied on that to support the claim of an exchange of gunfire.
“We’re forewarned [that] if you don’t have a proper defense, if you don’t have proper mitigation for children, this is what can happen,” Maxwell said
Parents still in disbelief
Andre Washington and Brontina Smith said they do not know how their boys came to have the gun that the officer claimed drew his fire.
During the trial, the prosecution showed several photos from Facebook of LaKeith Smith holding a gun. His mother said she had never seen the photos or the gun.
She still finds it hard to believe any of this happened.
The boy she knows is the one being picked up and tossed around by a cousin during a trip the family took to Lake Martin. He was skinny and looked like a ragdoll, she said. He was calling out to her, “Mama, where you at? I need you!”
Those words sent her swimming through the water to rescue him. “And they’re always in my mind,” she said. “Now, it just keeps me going because I know he needs me. If he’s not saying it verbally, I know he’s saying it mentally.”
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Micah Danney’s byline also has appeared in the New York Daily News, WNYC, Sojourners, Newsweek, Mental Floss, the GroundTruth Project, The Times of Israel, Religion Unplugged and other publications.