Longest-serving CT prisoner, now 97, released 72 years after Greenwich yacht club murder
GREENWICH — Francis Smith, the longest-serving prisoner in the state of Connecticut — incarcerated for a 1949 Greenwich murder he was convicted of in 1950 — is no longer behind prison walls.
Smith, now 97, has been released on “supervised parole” to the 60 West nursing home in Rocky Hill.
A longtime petty criminal from Noroton, Smith was sent away for his part in the killing of a night watchman at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club on the Greenwich shore, a conviction that observers and legal experts believe he was innocent of. Since that trial ended in a Bridgeport courtroom, he has spent 70 years in the custody of the state of Connecticut, aside from two short intervals.
He escaped from a prison farm in Enfield in 1967 and eluded a huge manhunt for 12 days. In his last taste of freedom before his release, he was out on parole for 10 months before committing a violation that put him back behind bars in 1975. After decades in jail, Smith had most recently been incarcerated at the Osborn Correctional Institute in Somers, which is a specialized jail unit for older prisoners.
According to the state Department of Correction, he was released in September 2020.
Smith had initially been reluctant to accept parole when it was offered to him several years ago, according to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, but has since accepted a placement at the 60 West facility, a privately-run operation that contracts with the state for housing elderly parolees.
Richard Sparaco, executive director of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, said there had been no problems with Smith since his release.
“He’s doing well under supervision,” he said.
Like prison and parole officials around the country, Sparaco said the issue of an aging prison population has become a significant question. The prison population has been seeing a rising number of older inmates behind bars, a consequence of longer prison sentences that were imposed in the 1980s and 90s for convicted felons.
The state of Connecticut allows prisoners who was are diagnosed as “debilitated” to receive a “compassionate” release, but that threshold was fairly high, said Sparaco. A new policy was implemented in June 2021, lowering the threshold for commutation and giving the parole board more flexibility.
“We’ve expanded our own policies to account for somebody who may not meet the requirements of compassionate release, but who is in that elder category,” said Sparaco. Now parole officials are looking at the “extent to which whether continued service on a sentence is in the interest of justice,” and other factors involving a prisoner’s conviction.
“What the board is doing is … to take the opportunity to take another look, and ask: where are they now? What’s in the best interest for the state of Connecticut and justice, too? We’re looking at all factors. And it’s not just, ‘they’ve been been incarcerated a long time, we should let them out’ — that’s not what we’re doing,” Sparaco noted.
In Smith’s case, a number of observers and legal officials have questioned the length of his sentence, as well as the handling of his murder conviction nearly three-quarters of a century ago.
Newspaper articles about the trial of Francis Smith.
Zachary Frey, a data analyst from Greenwich with a strong interest in history, has questions about Smith’s guilt after closely reading about the shooting death of the night watchman, Grover Hart, at the yacht club. Two guns and two shooters were involved in the killing of the 68-year-old security guard. One of the shooters, George Lowden of Stamford, quickly took a plea deal offered by the State’s Attorney and claimed the other suspect was Francis (Frank) Smith. Lowden was released from jail in 1966.
Lowden later said he had been forced into naming Smith as the shooter at the boat club by law enforcement authorities. A key witness later recanted her testimony implicating Smith as the second shooter. Another petty criminal from Stamford who was serving time in an Alabama prison, David Blumetti, came forward to claim he was the other accomplice.
To Frey, studying the circumstances of the case, “It is absolutely fair to say that Smith was wrongfully imprisoned.” He called it a “miscarriage of justice” that Smith was convicted of first-degree murder, as well as the dismissal of his appeals that were turned down in 1965 in federal court.
“Smith probably didn’t shoot Grover Hart, and an innocent man probably spent 70 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, but that’s only part of the story. The way Smith’s case was mishandled is disturbing and reeks of prosecutorial misconduct, and he was never given a fair chance to prove his innocence,” said Frey.
Smith was due to be electrocuted in the death house at Wethersfield before he was granted a reprieve in 1954. His head had been shaved in preparation for his trip to the electric chair, but a call from the Board of Pardons just two hours before the execution commuted the death sentence to 25 years to life in prison.
Smith, who was born in 1924, is an extreme outlier because of his longevity, but he is by no means alone as a member of the aging prison population. The men in their 60s, 70s and 80s, serving time on convictions from the 1980s and ‘90s, present unique ethical challenges, as well as financial and practical concerns, said an expert and author on the topic, Fordham University Professor Tina Maschi. Roughly a quarter-million older men are currently behind bars in the U.S.
Incarcerating prisoners over the age of 55 typically costs three times as much as younger inmates, a difference of $68,000 a year compared with $22,000 a year, according to Maschi’s research.
“As people age, they often require more resources related to health. And in prison, there’s an accelerated aging process, they age about three times faster. That’s why it’s very costly in prison,” said Maschi, a professor in the Fordham Graduate School of Social Service and an author on the subject of aging prisoners.
Maschi questions whether old men, sometimes chained to beds in prison infirmaries for crimes committed decades ago, served the cause of justice, or society at large.
“We get stuck on the frame: When someone’s guilty, they’re always guilty,” she said. “When is there a time when we let go?”
On a practical note, the social-service professor said a number of European nations had been releasing older prisoners from maximum-security facilities to more community-based residences, an alternative worth exploring in the U.S. In addition, she said, better “self-care techniques” for inmates could be taught and integrated in prisons.
The question of an aging prison population in Connecticut has taken a backseat to the more pressing issue of juvenile crime, says State Rep. Stephen Meskers of Greenwich, who was familiar with the Smith case. But, he noted, the issue of youth crime was also related to the aging prison population. Smith himself spent time at a juvenile detention facility for a string of petty crimes that began when he was a teenager.
At the state capital, Meskers said, lawmakers are seeking to address the right balance of punishment for young offenders. “What has consumed us are questions and issues related to juvenile justice because of the spike in crime. And what diversionary practices are there to keep people out of a trajectory that damages them and all of us?” the state legislator asked.
As to the aging prison population, Meskers said, it appeared there were thorny legal, ethical and practical challenges that defied easy answers.
“When a person has been deemed to have paid their debt to society, the real question is: Have we adequately dealt with the next stage of their life?” he said. “And I don’t know.”
A request to interview Smith at the Rocky Hill facility is currently being processed, according to the DOC.
rmarchant@greenwichtime.com
