By Emily Sullivan
Associate Editor
The world is an ugly place.
On Sept. 29, 1998, a man named Steven Smith raped and killed his girlfriend’s daughter, Autumn Carter. He walked into girlfriend Kaysha Frye’s bedroom with Autumn in his arms and placed her next to Frye. She realized Autumn wasn’t breathing and told Smith he killed her, according to an April 2 ABC News story.
Autumn was just six months old.
When Smith originally went to trial, he was not tried for sexual assault, just aggravated murder. However, in his indictment, rape was included among the charges. Under Ohio law, aggravated murder committed during the course of another crime, such as robbery or killing a police officer or a child, can make one eligible for the death penalty, according to the same story.
According to an April 2 Mail Online article, Smith is scheduled to receive the lethal injection on May 1. Ohio only has enough of the lethal injection drug to put three more people to death, and there are eight more people scheduled to die.
In a desperate last attempt to save his own life, Smith now admits that he intended to rape the baby girl, but he never intended to kill her, according to the same ABC News article.
Because that makes what he did so much more forgivable.
Smith claimed he was too drunk to realize that he was killing the child. Smith’s blood-alcohol content was 0.123, well over the legal limit, almost eight hours after the murder. If there was no intention to murder Autumn, then technically he would not receive the death penalty because he would not meet Ohio’s standards.
“The evidence suggests that Autumn’s death was a horrible accident,” Smith’s attorneys, Joseph Wilhelm and Tyson Fleming, wrote in the argument prepared for the board. “Despite the shocking nature of this crime, Steve’s death sentence should be commuted because genuine doubts exist whether he even committed a capital offense.”
Autumn was a baby. She couldn’t walk or talk, and yet for some reason, Smith decided to steal everything he could from this child. He stole her innocence, her purity and her life. He deprived a mother of her baby, a family of a loved one. Sure, maybe he didn’t go into her room with the intention of killing her, but what did he expect? He was a full-grown man, and she was barely big enough to sit up on her own.
How could he imagine the outcome would be any different?
Normally, I do not support the death penalty. I think it is senseless to kill someone in retribution for killing someone else. But in this case, I hope he receives the worse possible punishment. What Smith did was repulsive. It doesn’t matter if he didn’t intended to kill her. What he intended to do was bad enough.
Smith shouldn’t be allowed to have any semblance of a life. If, by some horrible chance, the board revokes his death sentence, Smith should be kept in a maximum security prison for the rest of his life.
If the judicial system decides not to end his life, they should take away as much of his life as possible. Throw him in a jail cell for the rest of his life and lose the key.
In the name of innocent little Autumn, I hope justice will be served.
