Meet Smitty: armed robber, jailhouse rocker and casualty of the war on crime
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
He has witnessed spectacular reforms and watched most of them get rolled back. A model prisoner, he has come within a hair's breadth of freedom only to see a deranged lifer, freed under dubious circumstances, embark on a violent rampage that set off a conservative political revolution.
William Smith scrutinizes many things. For one, prison food only gets worse; the instant mashed potatoes have grown so watery that they resemble wallpaper paste. The chicken? “It don’t taste like chicken; there’s no chicken that you can see.”
Fish, bread and string beans likewise flout all known definition.
These are the mundane concerns that make up a prisoner’s life; a focus on a world that, over the decades, continues to shrink within an institution’s walls. Smith, 72, has been confined at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford for nearly 50 years for his part in an armed robbery in Philadelphia that ended in murder. During that time, he has witnessed spectacular reforms — including one that allowed him to become a guitarist in a high-profile prison funk band — and he has watched most of them get rolled back. A model prisoner, he has come within a hair’s breadth of freedom — the commutation of his life sentence — only to see a deranged lifer, freed under dubious circumstances, embark on a violent rampage that set off a conservative political revolution.
Smith was a criminal, but he also became a victim of circumstance in the government’s war on crime. His story helps explain why Pennsylvania has the second-highest number of prisoners serving sentences of life without parole in the nation — a nation with the highest incarceration rate of any on earth.
Smith’s life of crime came to an end on the afternoon of March 21, 1968, when he and William Barksdale, 32, walked into a check-cashing store at 56th Street and Chester Avenue to commit an armed robbery.
When they entered the store, Edith Ticktin was sitting on a stool by the window; her husband, Charles, was helping a friend, Rose Kirk, prepare her tax return. The three were behind a bulletproof partition that separated the office from the front of the store. Edith looked up to see William Smith’s head emerge as he pulled himself up over the barrier. She ran up a flight of stairs into her house above, then out onto the sidewalk looking for help.
“I’ll never forget his face,” she later testified. “I ran down [and] I heard two shots. I didn’t know what happened.”
Smith, 26, was unarmed, but Barksdale was carrying a shotgun. He hit Charles Ticktin twice.
“My job was to get the money,” Smith says, as he sits across from me in a closet-sized room in Graterford’s visiting area wearing a brown Department of Corrections uniform. Smith’s hair has turned gray in prison and his hairline recedes above his slim face. “And that is what I was doing.”
Kirk testified that she ran to unbolt the door leading to the front of the store when someone slammed it back against her. Shots rang out, and she heard someone say, “Get all you can and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Kirk was protected by the door, but pellets from Barksdale’s shotgun hit Smith in the leg. The robbers hurried to a waiting car. Loretta Johnson, 21, was driving.
Edith Ticktin came out screaming, “Oh, my God, they shot my husband; they shot him.”
Charles Ticktin kept a gun in the store, says his son, Rick, but he didn’t use it. That day, Rick Ticktin came home to find his home surrounded by police. Edith had found her husband lying on the basement floor in a pool of blood. One shotgun blast had torn into his arm, the other into his side.
The call went out over the radio, and police driving west on Baltimore Avenue near 50th Street saw a black car speed toward them, and then make a quick left. The ensuing car chase continued across West Philadelphia, reaching speeds of 100 miles per hour. It ended when the getaway car’s transmission kicked at 52nd and Spruce streets.
Barksdale took off between the houses. He ran into the arms of police; so did Johnson. As Smith ran, an officer commanded him to halt. He didn’t, and the policeman shot him in the leg. An officer then hit Smith twice in the head with the butt of his gun. He said at trial that Smith attempted to escape, and that it was necessary to subdue him.
In the car, police found a sawed-off shotgun and $1,758. The robbers had left another $22,000 behind at the store.
Charles Ticktin was treated at Mercy Douglass Hospital, now closed. “I’m not going to make it,” he told his son Stanley, according to trial transcripts. “Why did they do it? I didn’t do anything to them; I didn’t resist.”
He died of the gunshot wounds eight days after the robbery.
When I reached Rick Ticktin by phone in Levittown, it was the first time he had been contacted in years about the men involved in killing his father. At the time of the robbery, he recalls, the competition posed by two newly opened banks seemed to pose a bigger threat than crime.
“We thought that would be the end of our business,” Rick says, ironically. “But we were there for nine years with two banks down the street. And that incident shut us down.”
Edith Ticktin sold the check-cashing store and moved the family to Northeast Philadelphia; it was part of a huge demographic transformation that would send whites like the Ticktins out of Southwest Philly. Edith testified that she had never read a single news account of the murder until the day she was cleaning out the old house and found some clippings in her son’s drawer.
Smith pleaded not guilty at the trial, but now admits his role in the robbery. He still doesn’t have a full picture of what occurred that day. “What happened, I didn’t even see it,” says Smith, who says he had his back turned when Barksdale opened fire.
He cannot figure out what had brought him into that store, or what had attracted him to crime. Smith was a hard worker at Donutland, a restaurant and donut factory in Clifton Heights, according to his manager. He also held down a job at the Hamburger restaurant in Center City, and as a lifeguard for the city. But the greater proceeds from crime were tempting: He served 21 months for a robbery he committed five years prior to the Ticktin one. Today, Smith has trouble seeing inside his old self, more than four decades in the past.
“That’s something that I’ve been asked, and I’ve asked myself,” says Smith, whom fellow inmates call Smitty. “To this day I can’t come up with a feasible, reasonable, answer.”
Smith was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. He was also convicted of a second armed robbery with Barksdale, committed at a North Philadelphia check-cashing store a month before the Ticktin robbery. That time, Smith was carrying the gun.
In 1968, crime and racial conflict were overtaking Philadelphia as it spiraled into industrial decline. Frank Rizzo, a future mayor, took the helm of the Police Department, promising law and order to his white, working-class base; to many in Philadelphia’s black community, it signaled an ominous backlash.
It was months after North Vietnamese forces launched the Tet Offensive and just five days after U.S. troops massacred civilians in the village of My Lai. It was the year Richard Nixon announced he would run for president, and weeks before Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated.
It was so long ago that during Smith’s trial, the judge told the prosecutor not to use the word “colored.” Smith is black.
“I suppose in this touchy day you had better use the word ‘Negro’ or ‘Black,’ one or the other,” he said, according to trial transcripts.
Today, the pages of Smith’s court records are faded and ragged, and the Ticktins’ Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood has changed from white to almost entirely black. At Graterford, Smith has seen guards and wardens come and go; his partner in crime, William Barksdale, is long dead.
Sitting in the visiting room, Smith sketches out the roads in Philadelphia that he used to travel. He recites the order of the Center City street grid, and then lets his mind wander out on Baltimore Pike, toward the now-closed Donutland, where he worked and met Barksdale. When Smith first entered the prison, Graterford was surrounded by Montgomery County farmland. Today, when I drive out from Philadelphia, the roads are covered by suburban homesteads occupied by people who left the city behind.
According to Pennsylvania law, it makes no difference whether Smith pulled the trigger. A life sentence in the state offers no chance at parole, and there is no alternative to life sentences for first- or second-degree murder (with the exception of the death penalty). Smith and other lifers can be freed only if the governor commutes their sentence. Over the past three decades, that has become exceedingly rare. In this state, 5,263 prisoners are serving life sentences, slightly more than the entire state prison population of 5,159 in 1968. Pennsylvania is second only to Florida in the number of prisoners serving life without parole.
Smith’s hopes rose in September 1992, when the five members of the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons unanimously recommended that Gov. Bob Casey commute his sentence and release him on Feb. 7, 1997. The prison staff, Graterford’s superintendent and the secretary of corrections supported his release. The board noted that Smith was committed to Christianity and had a job waiting outside, after having been trained in cable installation. Indeed, he was known as “Cable Smitty,” and he was only one signature away from freedom. But that form remained unsigned.
Today, Smith follows the early coverage of the November gubernatorial election closely, parsing the news accounts and television commercials. “We look at everything, and we scrutinize everything because we have a whole lot of time to do nothing but that,” he says.
He is hopeful that politics will undergo another revolution and open up a door it slammed shut two decades ago.
“Made the best of a bad situation,” he says, about his near-lifetime behind bars. “That’s what they call that.”
Smith has mailed me copies of his numerous degrees and certificates, and of the thesis he wrote for a degree in theology. As I pressed him for details of his life behind bars, he also mentioned that he had been in a prison band called Power of Attorney. I was surprised to find that the band, a funk-soul group, had gained a measure of fame in the mid-1970s with their album From the Inside, created, according to the liner notes, by “nine men from Graterford Prison … with something to say.” Like its sound, the band’s very existence is characteristic of a time long past. It was a brief moment when progressive criminal-justice reform seemed not only a possibility, but a necessity. But the reformers made their case amid rising violent crime, racial conflict and a painful economic transition. They were buried in the backlash that followed.
Changing man
in a changing land
Hustling to survive,
the very best he can …
Ghetto streets was his school
changing man was a fool
Killed a man and The Man did so
changing man that’s how you go, yeah
Back on the streets
in a changing world
A lifetime lost sent to jail …
Changing world, and so are you.
Changing man.
— “Changing Man,” by Power of Attorney (Brotherhood Records, 1973)
State Rep. James Kelly was touring Graterford in the early 1970s when he heard Smith and his band practicing in the prison basement.
“These guys weren’t good for a bunch of inmates,” Kelly, a rock fan, told a reporter at the time. “They were good, period.”
Kelly had met Shep Gordon, a legendary manager, backstage at an Alice Cooper concert in Pittsburgh, and called him about the Graterford musicians. “That’s what I kind of do for a living, is incubate these weird ideas for personalities,” Gordon told me by phone from his home in Hawaii.
Kelly looked the consummate politician, but “I looked like a drug dealer,” says Gordon. Plus, Gordon was a Democrat and Kelly a Republican, albeit a moderate. The match was odd, but Kelly had made prison reform a top priority.
Prisons “essentially were used as holding pens,” says Kelly, who retired from politics in 1976 and now lives in Bethesda, Md. “Unfortunately, things haven’t changed a whole lot.”
Gordon contacted his friend Stan Vincent, a major record producer. A local radio station donated sound equipment. Comedian Bill Cosby, who heard the band play while taping a television special at Graterford, paid for them to record a demo at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios.
Correctional authorities welcomed the idea. Gov. Milton Shapp, a liberal Democrat, was in office and a progressive black man, Robert Johnson, had been named Graterford’s superintendent in 1971. He succeeded A. T. Rundle, a hard-line disciplinarian. Johnson’s program would be quite different. It was the year of the prison uprising in Attica, N.Y., which ended in massive bloodshed, and the civil rights movement on the streets had made its way inside correctional institutions nationwide. Reform seemed urgent.
“We decided that there must be talents in the men that were not being given a chance,” said Ted Wing, the prison’s director of activities and owner of Nicetown Records and Brotherhood Records, in a 1974 interview. “We thought we wouldn’t be doing our jobs properly if we didn’t try to develop whatever talents the residents had.”
Wing held auditions for three months, and prisoners rushed to try out. Smith played rhythm guitar. His sister mailed him an instrument, and an inmate named Ernie Hazard gave him lessons. Power of Attorney was inspired by bands like Earth, Wind and Fire, War and Chicago. And “we were as good as they were,” Smith says.
“We got together knowing that we wanted to play rock and roll,” Smith said. “After that, it was just work and polish and practice.”
The band broke barriers and crossed jurisdictions, traveling to New York to record at the Record Plant studio. The trip required the coordination of four police departments. At the Record Plant studio, two New York Police Department officers stood watch alongside five prison guards who volunteered their time.
It “was really quite a feat,” says Kelly. “Nobody would try to do that today.”
At that point, five of the band members were in prison, three were on parole and one was in a halfway house. The album From the Inside was released on James Brown’s Polydor label, and included a ringing endorsement from the Godfather of Soul himself, thanking the “Bureau of Corrections for being understanding and giving these men this opportunity. I know because I was once in the same position. Thank God that somebody still cares.”
A separate 45, featuring the song “Changing Man,” was released on Wing’s Brotherhood Records.
Power of Attorney’s deep rhythm section was backed by a melodic walking bass, groovy horns and spacey vocals flying on top — with lyrics of distant love, ghetto life and hopes for freedom. The band played 86 concerts, says Smith, including one for Gov. Shapp at a hotel. “It made me optimistic,” he says. “It also made time go by easier.”
On the album jacket, Lt. Gov. Ernest Kline congratulated “men who have not only served and survived in prison, but have overcome the futility of imprisonment by their dedication to this creative production.” The producers returned the compliment, giving a “very special thanks to the State of Pennsylvania for being so progressive.”
Pennsylvania is not generally known as “progressive” when it comes to criminal justice and corrections. But The Power of Attorney band was a funky extension of Graterford Warden Johnson’s unconventional philosophy, which garnered widespread attention at the time: Johnson opened the nation’s first prisoner-run legal clinic, relaxed dress codes and initiated college-level courses run by Villanova University. Prisoners’ artwork was shown on the seventh-floor art gallery of Wanamaker’s in Center City. He brought in a yoga teacher, allowed prisoners to paint murals and proposed that “alternatives to imprisonment” be explored for most offenders. And he wanted to help smooth prisoners’ transition back into society, increasing furloughs and work-release programs.
Johnson was motivated by realism as much as sympathy for prisoners.
“Prisons provide a sense of security to people — it’s only a sense — because there’s no real security when you recognize most of these guys are going to get out anyway,” he told an interviewer in 1973. “All I’m trying to do is … protect the next victim by strengthening these guys, who then go back out and deal with the society without hitting somebody over the head.”
But Johnson’s furlough program prompted harsh criticism from law enforcement, judges and Mayor Rizzo. One prisoner, convicted in the 1968 bludgeon killing of a retired Lincoln University president, was arrested on charges of indecently assaulting a 14-year-old while on a weekend furlough. Another lifer escaped while on a trip to pick up Christmas cards in Philadelphia. In 1973, guards walked off the job in protest after an inmate murdered a guard. After one escape, Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Richard Sprague even threatened to have Johnson arrested if the escapee ended up harming a citizen.
Johnson was removed from the job in June 1974, and replaced by Julius T. Cuyler, who returned a more strict discipline to Graterford. By 1980, news accounts about Graterford no longer focused on art projects, but on tranquilized inmates losing their minds in the fetid and rat-infested solitary-confinement unit.
The new legal protections won by prisoners and criminal defendants during the civil rights era were in large part nullified by a new system of mass incarceration built atop laws that extended and stiffened sentences. As the inmate population swelled, Smith’s world got smaller. Smith and his wife divorced in 1979. She died in 2000.
“In an institution, things dissipate over a period of time. It’s like when you put a glass of water under the sun and it goes down and down. That’s what happens to a marriage, that’s what happens to a family. That’s what happens to anything you care about,” he says.
Smith remained hopeful that he would one day be released. Many lifers were leaving prison, and Smith had become a model inmate.
The anger that was growing among the men incarcerated at Camp Hill state prison in the late 1980s reflected a correctional system that was reaching its breaking point. The inmate population had exploded as wars on crime and drugs heated up on Philadelphia streets, and staffing levels failed to keep up. The prison, built in 1941 outside Harrisburg to hold 1,400 inmates, in 1988 held 2,584.
Violence erupted in late October 1989 as officers escorted 500 prisoners through a rec yard. One inmate struck an officer, and other prisoners moved to attack the guards who came to his aid. Guards rushed to a secure room, but inmates broke down the walls and took them hostage. The inmates set fires that destroyed a dining room, the hospital and a workshop where inmates made products like furniture and roasted coffee beans. The air smelled for miles like brewing coffee.
That evening, a Muslim inmate from the group Fruit of Islam entered negotiations with prison authorities, and presented a long list of grievances: a dearth of educational, vocational and rehabilitative programs, new rules barring visitors from bringing food to inmates and a new sick-call policy. The administration refused to commit to any changes, but agreed that prisoners could meet with the warden the next day. The prisoners ended the riot, releasing their hostages and returning to their cells. But the next night, after an unsatisfying meeting with the warden, a second riot broke out. Within hours, most of the prison came under inmate control. Between 40 to 50 people were trapped on the second story of the prison’s Control Center as a fire raged beneath them. After 875 state troopers were dispatched to the prison, the uprising was shut down and hostages were rescued. But dozens of inmates, staff and police had been injured, and much of the prison was destroyed.
A high-profile commission named by Gov. Casey faulted prison authorities for a chaotic and haphazard response. It also criticized prison conditions at great length, proposing that alternatives to incarceration be explored to ease overcrowding, and noted that one-third of Camp Hill inmates were idle on any given day because of a lack of programs. The panel called for earned time off for good behavior, and suggested that authorities consider commuting more life sentences.
But political decisions would be driven by headlines rather than by careful study. Warehousing — not rehabilitation — would remain the priority.
It seems strange that Gov. Casey decided to release Reginald McFadden from prison, given the small number of lifers he decided to let go. In 1969, at age 16, McFadden broke into Sonia Rosenbaum’s Philadelphia house with three accomplices. Surprised to find her inside, they gagged her, and she suffocated. It was his 17th arrest; he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life. But in prison, McFadden earned authorities’ gratitude. He testified against fellow inmates who attacked a guard at SCI-Pittsburgh, and was beaten and gagged by fellow prisoners during the Camp Hill riots for snitching; reportedly, he was also credited with helping authorities during the riot. He had also, however, committed a number of assaults against other inmates and attempted to escape. He was a loner. Prisoners would later say they would have advised against his release.
“If there were 100 people I would recommend, he wouldn’t be one of them,” one commuted lifer told City Paper in 1997.
At its Aug. 27, 1992 meeting, the Board of Pardons voted 4-1 to commute McFadden’s sentence after just a few minutes of discussion. Former board member Ronald J. Harper says that McFadden seemed like a model candidate if there was one. And this much is true: The only way to be entirely sure that an inmate will never re-offend is to never let a single inmate go free. But former state Attorney General Ernie Preate says that it was McFadden’s cooperation with prison authorities that had an enormous influence.
“They were reassured that he had served 20, 22 years, and that he had been quote-unquote ‘helpful’ to the Department on Camp Hill,” says Preate, who cast the lone vote against releasing McFadden, 41. “My judgment was different.”
In the 1970s, Gov. Milton Shapp commuted 251 life sentences. Those numbers dropped precipitously as the war on crime shifted into overdrive. Republican Gov. Richard Thornburgh, who went on to serve as Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, commuted just seven, turning down 68 recommendations. Casey, a Democrat, commuted just 27 life sentences. McFadden, freed four months after Casey signed his commutation on March 15, 1994, was one of the last.
Because of a bureaucratic error, McFadden bypassed the halfway house where he was supposed to spend two years and landed directly in New York that July. Three months later, he murdered two New Yorkers and brutally raped a third. Lt. Gov. Mark Singel, who presided over the board and voted yes, would be the Democratic candidate for governor in 1994. It was one of the decade’s most infamous crimes, and it quickly transformed the race.
Republican candidate Tom Ridge had already made crime his campaign’s “only issue” and, in a stroke of morbid political fortune, had launched an advertisement attacking Singel for his pardons-board votes just days before McFadden’s crime spree and arrest. Ridge and candidate for lieutenant governor Mark Schweiker pledged to approve commuting life sentences only in “extraordinary circumstances,” such as a wrongful conviction or a terminal illness.
McFadden, who dominated the headlines and sealed Singel’s defeat, became known as Pennsylvania’s Willie Horton.
After taking office, Ridge inaugurated a special session on crime and legislators placed a referendum restricting the commutation process before voters: Recommendations to the governor would now require unanimous support instead of a majority of the five votes. In addition, the board position reserved for a lawyer would now go to a crime victim.
The changes were approved by voters in 1997, and would be the subject of a decade-long court battle. In fact, commuted lifers had a good track record and very low recidivism rates. But McFadden was the exception that changed the rules. William Smith believes that his unsigned commutation form was sitting on Gov. Casey’s desk when McFadden began his killing spree. It was, for all practical purposes, the end of commutation.
“No one knew the Board of Pardons existed before McFadden,” said Nelson Zullinger, former Pardons Board secretary.
Republicans took the lead in making crime an emotional political issue, but Democrats quickly fell in line. Few lifers have had their sentences commuted since McFadden: zero under Ridge, one under Schweiker, five under Gov. Ed Rendell. Gov. Tom Corbett has commuted none. His lieutenant governor, Jim Cawley, who chairs the Board of Pardons, voted to oppose Smith’s most recent application.
Casey built new prisons across the state during his eight years in office. But after the riot, he would be defined not for overseeing a massive prison expansion, but for one of the few men he let out.
“You met him, and you look into his eyes, you knew that he was deranged,” says Tyrone Werts, whose sentence was commuted by Rendell, describing McFadden. “The system saw fit to let him go. But if they would have came around to different prisons [and] said, ‘What do you think about McFadden? You think that he’s a good candidate for commutation?’ ‘Hell no, [don’t] let that crazy motherfucker out.’”
In 1995, the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole paroled Warlocks bike gang member Robert “Mudman” Simon, disregarding strong warnings from the judge who convicted him. He soon shot and killed a New Jersey police officer. After that, paroles, like commutations, declined dramatically. Inmate hopes for freedom were now nearly dashed because of the actions of two deranged men and scared politicians navigating fevered public opinion.
“They hate Mudman and they hate McFadden,” parole advocate Ted Klugman said in a 1995 interview, succinctly describing prisoner sentiment.
As Smith’s chance at freedom receded, his life at Graterford grew harder. Smith had worked outside the prison for years and lived in a unit outside the walls, a housing program that ended for lifers in 1997. Today, the political fervor around criminal justice has subsided, and politicians now feel that it is safe to point out the folly of incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders. Violent offenders, particularly lifers like Smith, still pose an unacceptable political risk. McFadden casts a long shadow.
“The Republicans kind of seized on something that scared enough people, and they got into that strict sentencing and do-the-time-to-the-crime thing,” says Marshall Smith, William’s younger brother, a retired Philadelphia Police officer now living in Fayetteville, Ga. “I think at some point you should consider the actual circumstance, and the individual.”
Smith’s family is full of cops. His older sister Ardella’s late husband was a police officer. Marshall Smith entered the Philadelphia Police Academy just a few weeks after the murder. Smith’s youngest brother, Jerome Smith, joined soon after. He was on the SWAT team, and met the man who shot his brother.
“Hey, they was just doing their job,” says Jerome, sitting in the living room of his suburban ranch house in Glenside, where he moved from West Oak Lane as soon as he retired from the force. His wife brings us two carafes of water, with and without ice. Having a brother serving life never changed Jerome Smith’s outlook as a cop. Indeed, he used to recognize people he had arrested during visits to his brother in Graterford.
“Nothing personal. Just a job,” he says. “If you wrong, you wrong.”
Smith — his family calls him Billy — was the oldest boy and their mother, Winifred Hankerson, depended on him for advice and support. Testifying at trial, she said that she could not believe he would commit such a crime. She remained dedicated to Billy, and organized weekly family visits until she died in 1999. Marshall recalls how angry she was when prison authorities barred visitors from bringing in home-cooked meals.
“She made sure he got his visit,” says Ardella Graves. “We don’t go up as much.”
Hankerson did piecework sewing for a Chinatown store, and worked at the Botany 500 plant at Broad and Lehigh. Billy brought home a paycheck that helped take care of the family after Billy’s father died in 1953, and was the man of the house while his mother struggled financially and through an abusive second marriage. Family members recall that Smith changed for the worse after his two-month-old son, Billy, died from SIDS in 1962.
“We were very poor,” says Ardella, remembering her childhood in North and West Philadelphia. She was the oldest sibling. “We didn’t have enough, and Billy wanted more things than what we had. I think every child wants more than what he has and what he can get. He found out a way to get it.”
The siblings are making no excuses. Born poor and black in post-war Philly, they climbed out of poverty and into the middle class.
William Smith is applying for his sentence to be commuted again, and he is readying his portfolio: degrees, journeyman electrician certificate, recommendations and a rare copy of Power of Attorney LP From the Inside. Today, Smith is in another prison band. But they play Christian music, and don’t go on tour.
This will be one of his final shots at getting out. Former Attorney General Preate believes that McFadden’s actions upon his release have perverted the justice system, and that more lifers deserve a shot at freedom. Since serving 14 months for mail fraud, Preate himself has become a leading advocate for criminal-justice reform. Today, the state’s prison population stands at 51,400, or10 times larger than when Smith first walked in the door.
“Since 1994 … we’ve had less than a handful of people [who] have gotten commuted,” says Preate. “And that’s wrong. Because there’s a lot of deserving lifers who have served their time, rehabilitated themselves and are no longer a threat to society.”
Rick Ticktin, the victim’s son, says he would be fine with Smith getting his freedom.
“Just go about whatever life you have left, and live,” says Ticktin. “Maybe after 20 or 30 years, you find that you made a big mistake. And prison changed you, hopefully.”
The Smiths also understand the victim’s perspective. In 2006, Marshall Smith’s stepdaughter was walking home with her boyfriend in Olney when they interrupted a man raping a woman. Both were shot dead. But Jerome says the scales of justice must balance.
“I think that’s enough. He was just an accomplice,” Jerome says. “What’s he gonna do out here in the world? Wants to get a little job, wants to get an apartment, and just live out the rest of his time. That’s all.”
Actually, lifers can accomplish quite a lot if given the opportunity. Tyrone Werts, commuted by Rendell after spending decades as president of Graterford’s lifers organization, was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship for his violence-prevention work in the community.
The Smith family was hoping that Ticktin would write a letter on Billy’s behalf, but Ticktin says he is not prepared to do that: Basically, whatever happens is fine with him. During a prison visit in February, I told Smith that I had located Rick Ticktin. Neither Smith nor anyone from his family has met a Ticktin in all of this time. Smith paused, and asked me to deliver a message. He said he wanted him to know that he is “very remorseful,” a “much better man that I was,” and much more “educated and spiritual.”
“I will be a person that he will not ever be sorry that he supported, if he supports me. And my family is very sorry, because they’ve paid the same price I have.”
“I’m a victim of my own self,” Smith says. But “the politics of this has overwhelmed the situation.”
