Lemuel Smith

Victims

6 - convictions cover the 1958 robbery assault, four killings of 1976 and 1977 for which he received three consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life, and the 1981 murder of correction officer Donna Payant, committed while he was already serving those terms. He was sentenced to DEATH for the Payant murder in 1983 and THE SENTENCE WAS STRUCK DOWN AS UNCONSTITUTIONAL IN 1984, not commuted; he was the only person ever sentenced under the New York provision that ruling invalidated

Years active

1958 / 1976 - 1977 / 1981

Location

Albany, New York, USA

Method

Beating / Shooting / Strangulation

Status

Convicted in 1958 of a robbery in which a woman was beaten, and released in 1976 after eighteen years. Within a year he killed four more people. Arrested on August 19, 1977 and sentenced to three consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life. IN 1981, WHILE SERVING THOSE TERMS AT GREEN HAVEN CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, HE KILLED DONNA PAYANT, A CORRECTION OFFICER, and was convicted of her murder and SENTENCED TO DEATH ON JUNE 10, 1983 under a New York statute making death mandatory for a life prisoner who kills. THAT SENTENCE WAS NOT COMMUTED. THE NEW YORK COURT OF APPEALS STRUCK IT DOWN IN 1984 as unconstitutional, holding a MANDATORY death sentence impermissible because it allowed no consideration of mitigating circumstances, and he was resentenced to life. The ruling ended the last operative death penalty provision in New York and he was the only person sentenced under it. He has been refused parole repeatedly and remains in New York state custody.

Smith was born in 1941 in Amsterdam, New York. He was convicted of attempted murder in 1958, aged sixteen, and served eight years. Released, he married and worked, and in 1976 and 1977 he killed five people: Dorothy Waterstreet; Robert Hedderman, forty-eight, and his secretary Margaret Byron, fifty-nine, in a religious goods shop in Albany; Joan Richburg, twenty-four, in a shopping mall car park; and Maralie Wilson, thirty. He was arrested on August 19, 1977 and received three life terms.

On May 15, 1981, at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, he killed Donna Payant, a thirty-one-year-old corrections officer, in the prison chaplain's office. Her body was found at a landfill in the prison rubbish. She was the first female corrections officer killed on duty in the United States.

He was convicted of that murder and sentenced to death on June 10, 1983, under a New York statute that made the killing of a prison guard by a serving prisoner capital. In 1984 the New York Court of Appeals struck the statute down in his case, People v. Smith, holding it unconstitutional to make the death penalty mandatory. The sentence became life.

The Payant killing changed how women were deployed in New York's maximum-security prisons and was the subject of an inquiry into how a prisoner with his record came to have unsupervised access to that part of the facility. He remains in custody.

The count of six in this roster is the five Albany-area killings plus Payant. Smith is also alleged to have committed further killings, none charged.