The case of slain D.C. police officer Oliver Wendell Smith Jr. illustrates how the rule allowing reconsideration of a sentence can keep families in limbo for years, victims advocates say. In 1997, Smith, 28, was robbed of $60 and shot to death outside his Forestville apartment. He left behind a wife and a son who was five years old at the time.
Three men were convicted of murder and sentenced to long prison terms.
One of them, Antwuan Delonte Brown, was sentenced to life plus 60 years without the possibility of parole. His most recent hearing for a new sentence has been rescheduled three times in the last year and is now set for September.
The reconsideration case for another of Smith’s killers, Donovan Shawn Strickland, has been held up for several years. At a hearing packed with D.C. police officers, County Circuit Court judge Richard H. Sothoron Jr. denied Strickland’s motion for a hearing for reconsideration. But in 2009, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that Strickland was entitled to a hearing. That hearing has not yet occurred.
“Why are we still going through this?” Smith’s father, Oliver Smith said. “You relive it all over again,” said Smith, a retired communications engineer.
The stress has taken a toll on Smith. A doctor said the muscles around his neck had tensed so much that they dislocated two vertebrae in his back. He has chronic back pain, along with numbness in his hands.
The lack of closure from Maryland’s sentence reconsideration rules is painful to victims and their families, experts said.
“Victims never seem to get a sense of finality that the case is over,” said Russell Butler, of the Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center.
“If we had any consideration for the victims and their families, we wouldn’t make them run this gauntlet. In some instances, it’s even cruel,” said Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy.
