Dorian Finney-Smith grew up never remembering a father’s hug. He had only met his dad through the glass partitions of a prison’s visiting area. All that changed Tuesday with an emotional reunion in Chesapeake, thanks to two sports teams — and the unlikely assistance of former Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore.
Sports fans may recognize Finney-Smith’s name. A basketball star at I.C. Norcom High School in Portsmouth, he led the team to back-to-back state championships. He played for a year at Virginia Tech, then transferred to Florida. Since 2016, he’s been in the National Basketball Association, most of that time with the Dallas Mavericks until he was traded to the Brooklyn Nets in April as part of the deal that sent Kyrie Irving to Dallas. The 6-7 forward is currently averaging 10.3 points per game.
Now, here’s what even sports fans may not know: Finney-Smith’s father, Elbert Smith, has been in prison, convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 44 years behind bars. “He’s been in jail since I was 3 years old,” Finney-Smith told me. “I don’t remember touching him.”
His father’s status was never a secret, but it also wasn’t particularly well-known. When Finney-Smith was at Florida, “Coach Billy Donovan wondered why he seemed socially withdrawn,” the Dallas Morning News wrote in a story this past summer. His player explained “the anger and sense of abandonment he felt toward his father.”
The paper went on to say: “At Donovan’s urging, Finney-Smith returned to Virginia, got counseling and forged a closer relationship with Elbert. When Finney-Smith later went unselected in the NBA draft and considered quitting basketball, it was his father who persuaded him not to give up.”
Years went by. Finney-Smith went on to become a starter in the NBA while his father remained behind bars.
The Mavericks, the team Finney-Smith was playing for, are owned by billionaire Mark Cuban. Cuban’s chief of staff is Jason Lutin — like Finney-Smith, a University of Florida graduate. “Nearly three years ago, Finney-Smith explained his father’s circumstances to Lutin,” the Dallas paper reported. “Lutin spent months culling background about the case and helping Finney-Smith explore legal and political avenues.”
Those avenues led to a most unlikely advocate.
Mention Jerry Kilgore to anyone who follows Virginia politics and three words are likely to come to mind: “tough on crime.” The twin brother of House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, Jerry Kilgore is a former federal prosecutor. He went on to become secretary of public safety under Gov. George Allen, who was elected in 1993 on a platform of abolishing parole. Kilgore oversaw that initiative — and the construction of new prisons — and then went on to be elected attorney general in 2001. Today he’s an attorney in Richmond with the firm Cozen O’Connor. The last time I saw Kilgore in person was last year, when he accompanied our present attorney general, Jason Miyares, on a tour of Red Onion State Prison in Wise County.
Lutin’s search for an attorney in Virginia led to one of Kilgore’s law partners, who then turned to Kilgore.
“You can probably guess my initial reaction,” Kilgore told me recently. “He’s not going to get paroled.”
While Virginia has abolished parole, that abolition does not apply to prisoners convicted before the law took effect in 1995 — and a subsequent court ruling said that Smith was part of a group of inmates who qualified. However, when Lutin first contacted Kilgore, Smith had not yet served long enough to meet the criteria for parole.
“About a year went by before they got back to me,” Kilgore recalled. By then, Smith was nearing eligibility but the politics of the moment made parole an unlikely option. The last years of Gov. Ralph Northam’s term had been marked by a flurry of controversial early releases that became Republican fodder in the 2021 statewide campaign. One of the first things that Gov. Glenn Youngkin did in office was to replace the state Parole Board. The new board was a lot less likely to grant parole than the previous one had been.
However, Lutin was insistent, Kilgore said. “He said it was very important to Mark Cuban to help Dorian Finney-Smith out because he realized how close he was to his father. He visited his father all the time.”
Kilgore was skeptical, to say the least. “I had never taken a parole case ever,” Kilgore said. “I was the one who led the effort for Governor Allen to abolish parole and all that.”
However, he agreed to at least look into the case. Here’s what he found:
Elbert Smith had served in the Navy, was honorably discharged, but had trouble finding work in Hampton Roads after his military service. He had no history of violent crime until Jan. 25, 1995. That day the 23-year-old Smith and 34-year-old Deifan McGann went to a Virginia Beach auto repair shop to collect a debt from Willie Anderson II. Both McGann and Smith were armed. According to the Dallas Morning News: “A skirmish ensued, with Anderson attempting to wrest McGann’s gun. Smith told police he lunged at Anderson with a knife, causing Anderson to let go of McGann’s gun. McGann admitted to police that after regaining control of the gun, he fired three shots at Anderson, who staggered outside, collapsed into a ditch and died.”
Both McGann and Smith were charged with first-degree murder. Both were also offered a deal to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and serve five years. McGann took the deal. Smith — on the advice of his court-appointed attorney — turned down the deal, arguing that he didn’t fire the fatal shots. He went to trial, where the jury convicted him of second-degree murder, and was given a sentence of 44 years.
The disparity between the two sentences — five years for the admitted shooter, 44 years for someone who didn’t fire the gun — caught Kilgore’s eye. Still, like I said, Kilgore’s whole background has been about being tough on crime.
“Before I did really dive in, I did want to see him face to face,” Kilgore told me. First, he talked to the warden at Greensville Correctional Center, where Smith was imprisoned. The warden told Kilgore: “I’ve never heard of him.” Kilgore replied: “That’s what I want to hear.” That meant Smith didn’t have a reputation as a troublemaker.
Then Kilgore met with Smith. “I needed to assess him for myself,” Kilgore said. “I found him to be just a genuinely likable guy who got caught up in this horrible situation.”
He reported back to Lutin that he’d not only take the case, he’d do it pro bono.
Kilgore began assembling a presentation to the parole board. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver wrote a letter. Former Dallas Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle, now with the Indiana Pacers, wrote a letter and testified virtually. “We had tons of letters because people knew Dorian and they weren’t going to say no to Mark Cuban,” Kilgore said. Finney-Smith himself spoke to the parole board, accompanied by both Lutin and Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison. “We didn’t even know if we would be able to be in the room, but that didn’t matter,” Harrison told the Dallas Morning News. “It was all about Dorian, for him to know that he didn’t have to fly there by himself; that his team was there to support him.”
While those big names might draw attention, Kilgore also knew that they alone would not sway the parole board. Those witnesses could talk about how reliable and trusted Finney-Smith was, but they didn’t know his father. “The one question this parole board would want answered is, ‘Is he going to reoffend?'” Kilgore said. At one point in his confinement, Smith had punched a guard at Keen Mountain Correctional Center in Buchanan County, which got him moved to solitary confinement in Red Onion. Since then, though, Smith’s good behavior had earned him a transfer to Greensville. “In the last 10 years, he had not been a problem,” Kilgore said. “He had participated in all these programs to better himself.”
Finally, Smith had something that most prisoners facing release don’t: a clear plan for after his release. “I think our presentation for the parole board was unlike a lot of inmates you see,” Kilgore said. “We have a plan, a post-incarceration plan, he’ll be involved in the community, so you don’t have the usual situation, when you’re out on parole, you don’t have a job, you don’t have a working history.”
The plan here was for Smith to move to the home of Finney-Smith’s sister, Monnazjea, in Chesapeake. “Both Dorian and his sister are strong personalities,” Kilgore said. “Dorian would provide for him. He’d move back into the family home.” Finney-Smith has used some of his basketball earnings to establish a foundation — the Finney Family First Foundation — aimed at helping low-income youth. It’s sponsored free basketball and softball camps in Hampton Roads, among other activities. “The father will do some volunteer work for them,” Kilgore said.
The Jan. 25 parole board hearing seemed to go well, Kilgore thought. Lutin told the Dallas Morning News that after Finney-Smith spoke about how much his father meant to him, board chairman Chat Dotson became “visibly emotional.” (Dotson, now head of the state prison system, declined to comment on the case.) But then there was a long silence, a silence that eventually lasted months. “Then they start reviewing their file,” Kilgore said. “You wait and wait.” The Dallas Morning News reports that Dotson interviewed a prison psychologist about Smith and that board vice-chairman Samuel Boone visited Smith in prison.
The parole board membership also changed, presenting one complication. Then came another: On Feb. 6, Finney-Smith was traded away from the team whose management had helped arrange legal representation and supported him in other ways. As Finney-Smith departed for his new team in Brooklyn, Lutin told him: “You’re always family.” The Mavericks continued to support Finney-Smith, even as he played for another team.
In July, Kilgore’s phone rang: It was Dotson. Smith had been granted parole. “I called Dorian to let him know,” Kilgore said. “He was very emotional — he was so grateful.” But then came another wait. Paroled prisoners don’t just get to walk out the door. There’s a pre-release program as the inmate is prepared for life outside prison walls. For Smith, that program was delayed by problems at the prison that led to multiple lockdowns — at least six fatal drug overdoses and a riot. Five more months went by.
Over the past week, Finney-Smith’s team, the Nets, were on a West Coast swing. On Monday night, they played in Salt Lake City against the Utah Jazz. That’s when he got the word: His father would be coming home the next day. The Nets, like the Mavericks before them, had told Finney-Smith they’d support him, and the team kept its word. After the game, the Nets chartered a private jet to fly Finney-Smith directly to Norfolk so he could be there for the homecoming. “It was a long, rough flight,” he said. “Some stuff is just bigger than basketball.”
Tuesday morning, Finney-Smith and his family sat at home and waited for yet another phone call — this one the phone call. When it finally came, they learned that Smith would be arriving at the parole office in Chesapeake early that afternoon. “It’s about a 12-minute drive from the house but it felt like 30,” Finney-Smith said, but there was his father. “It was all hugs and kisses,” Finney-Smith said. Hugs he’d never remembered getting. When they got back home about 1:45 p.m, “all the grandkids were waiting for him,” Finney-Smith said. Five in all, ranging from 13 down to 5 months.
On Tuesday afternoon, Finney-Smith took time from the reunion to call me to talk about the case. In the background, I could hear family members talking excitedly. “Man, it feels like a movie,” he said. “What I took away from this is, man, just ask for help. All it took was me asking. A year and a half, two years later, my pop’s home. Two years ago we didn’t think he would get home. I’m just thankful.”
He’s thankful for the Mavericks, he’s thankful for the Nets — and he’s also thankful for Kilgore. “Things have been smooth since Mr. Kilgore stepped into our lives,” he said.
By the next day, Finney-Smith was back in New York, where his Nets had a game Wednesday night against their cross-town rivals, the New York Knicks. The next goal: Arranging for his father to come see him play.