"Not According to My Standards": Lemuel Smith's Jailhouse Interview, c. 1983

Name: "Not According to My Standards": Lemuel Smith's Jailhouse Interview, c. 1983
Uploaded: 2024-02-22
Duration: 2 min 20 s
Description: Under sentence of death for the murder of corrections officer Donna Payant, Lemuel Smith told an Albany TV reporter he was innocent and was at peace.

Under sentence of death for the murder of corrections officer Donna Payant, Lemuel Smith told an Albany TV reporter he was innocent and was at peace.

Subject: Lemuel Warren Smith
Recorded: about July 23, 1983
Runtime: 2:20

Content warning: Refers to rape, kidnapping, murder and the sexual mutilation of a murdered woman.

The Interview

While Lemuel Smith was under sentence of death in New York for the 1981 murder of Green Haven corrections officer Donna Payant, he spoke to a reporter from WRGB CBS 6 in Albany. The station later described the interview as part of a public relations campaign in which Smith proclaimed his innocence. In the surviving clip, Smith answers that he does not deserve to die "according to my standards", says he has looked death in the face "ever since I was born black", and says he is not afraid because he has not done anything.

Historical Context

Smith, born in Amsterdam, New York, in 1941, had a long record of violence. In 1979 he was convicted of the 1976 murders of Robert Hedderman and Margaret Byron in Albany and sentenced to 50 years to life, and he was also serving sentences for attempted rape and kidnapping. On May 15, 1981, Donna Payant, a 31-year-old corrections officer at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, disappeared inside the prison; her body was found the next day at a landfill. She is reported to have been the first female New York State corrections officer killed in the line of duty.

Circumstances of the Interview

Smith was tried for Payant's murder in Dutchess County, with William Kunstler as his lawyer, and bite-mark evidence was central to the case. He was found guilty of first-degree murder on April 21, 1983. Because New York law then made death the mandatory sentence for first-degree murder committed by a prisoner already serving a life term, Justice Albert Rosenblatt sentenced him to death on June 10, 1983. Smith did not testify at his trial. As the WRGB narrator says, after the verdict he chose to take his case to the press instead. The station has not dated the interview; the narrator's statement that Smith was 42 places it after July 23, 1983.

What the Interview Covers

The reporter asks whether Smith deserves to die, how it feels to face execution, whether he knows who killed Payant, and whether he is afraid. Smith denies the murder. Through the narrator, he suggests that Payant was set up by corrections officers who were trying to blackmail her into a prison drug ring with compromising photographs, and that she was not killed inside the prison. Asked about the photographs, he answers with questions of his own about whether the state police confiscated them.

What Makes the Recording Significant

At the time Smith was under a mandatory death sentence, and his appeal tested the state's mandatory death penalty. On July 2, 1984, in People v. Smith, the New York Court of Appeals upheld his conviction but held the mandatory death penalty unconstitutional, and he was resentenced to life. The clip records, in his own voice, the innocence claim he has maintained for decades.

Archival Importance

Smith has spent long periods since in isolation in New York prisons, and recorded interviews with him appear to be scarce. His claim that others killed Payant has not gone away: in 2025 Payant's son, who worked as a prison officer for 28 years, told WRGB he doubts that Smith was the killer. This clip preserves Smith's account from the period when his life depended on his appeal.

Important Caveats

Smith's denials and his account of a corrections-officer plot are his claims; a jury convicted him and the Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. The narrator's statement that he "allegedly confessed to a fellow inmate" is the station's report. The date of the interview is inferred, not documented. One of Smith's key replies (01:03) is heard differently by the two machine transcripts ("I know I didn't" or "I know I did"); a third machine pass in the fact check heard "I know I didn't", which fits the rest of the clip, but it must still be checked by a listener before it is quoted.

Lemuel Smith: ...born black.

Narrator: Lemuel Smith, 42 years old, serving three life terms for rape, kidnap and murder, is one of the few men alive to face death in the electric chair. The sentence is automatic. It comes with his conviction for the murder of Green Haven guard Donna Payant in May of 1981. He allegedly confessed to a fellow inmate that he deserved to die. The sexual mutilation matched his pattern of killing.

Wrgb Reporter: Do you deserve to die?

Lemuel Smith: Do I deserve to die? Not according to my standards.

Narrator: Others feel differently.

Wrgb Reporter: How does it feel knowing you're now condemned to die and you're forced to look death in the face?

Lemuel Smith: I've looked death in the face ever since I was born black.

Wrgb Reporter: You're not saying that everything that's happened [unclear: "to you" / "here"] in your life has happened because you're black.

Lemuel Smith: [unclear: "It's had" / "This has"] something to do with it.

Narrator: As is his legal right, Lemuel Smith did not take the stand during the trial. If he had, the prosecution would have had the right to cross-examine him. But now that he's been found guilty, he's elected to go to the press to profess his innocence.

Wrgb Reporter: Do you know who did kill her?

Lemuel Smith: [unclear: "I know I didn't" / "I know I did"]. That's what's important.

Wrgb Reporter: But do you know who did? And if you do, why aren't you saying, to get yourself off?

Lemuel Smith: Would it get me off?

Wrgb Reporter: But why wouldn't you tell if you knew?

Lemuel Smith: Who wouldn't want to believe that I didn't kill her?

Narrator: Smith hinted Payant was not killed inside the prison. He says she was set up by corrections officers who were trying to blackmail her with photographs they'd taken of her in compromising sexual situations. It was their way of getting her into the prison drug ring. Her guard jacket was never found. Her body was found in the prison dump.

Wrgb Reporter: If she was killed by corrections officers, was she involved with drugs, do you believe? Was that part of it? Was her [unclear: "sexual" / "sex"]... Was she being blackmailed?

Lemuel Smith: I don't know.

Wrgb Reporter: Had photographs been taken of her that you know of, [unclear: "involved sexually" / "and robbed sexually"]?

Lemuel Smith: Did the state police confiscate [unclear: "them" / "him" / "her"]? Where are they? Did the state police confiscate [unclear: "them" / "him" / "her"]? And they disappeared?

Narrator: As he said on the day of the verdict, he goes to his fate in peace.

Wrgb Reporter: Do you think you'll die in the electric chair, or by injection, or some other state-imposed means?

Lemuel Smith: [unclear: "No" / "Knows"], God knows the future. I don't.

Wrgb Reporter: Are you scared about that?

Lemuel Smith: No. Should I be? Should I be afraid? I mean, that would be a better story if I was afraid, but why would I be afraid? I haven't done anything. Like I said, I got peace. ---