#firing line

"History is a conversation with the past in the present, hopefully creating a future that we will be proud of."

Edgar H. Smith Jr., right, appearing with William F. Buckley on his television program, “Firing Line.” Mr. Buckley championed Mr. Smith’s release from death row but came to regret it ...Bettmann, via Getty Images

Mr. Smith had been behind bars in California since 1976 for abducting and stabbing a San Diego woman, who escaped death by a fraction of an inch as the knife blade missed her heart. But as ugly as the California crime was, it was the slaying of a teenage girl in Bergen County, N.J., in 1957, two decades earlier, that had made Edgar Smith infamous.

Mr. Smith once seemed destined for the electric chair for that killing, which New Jersey detectives described as one of the most horrible they had ever seen.

In 1968, the United States Supreme Court ordered the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to reconsider its decision to deny Mr. Smith a hearing on the validity of his confession. Finally, on May 14, 1971, a Third Circuit judge ruled after a hearing that the confession had indeed been coerced, and that the prisoner must be freed if prosecutors did not retry him.

Bergen County prosecutors concluded that without the confession they had a weak case. On Dec. 6, 1971, Mr. Smith was allowed to plead no contest to a reduced charge of second-degree murder and was sentenced to the time he had already served. During the court proceeding he said he had killed Victoria Zielinski, but after leaving the courthouse he declared that he had uttered the words only to put his long ordeal behind him. (He had been on death row longer than any other United States prisoner up to that time.)

Mr. Smith immediately appeared on Mr. Buckley’s “Firing Line” program, holding forth about criminal justice and prison reform. The conversation was steered by Mr. Buckley, who said he believed “profoundly” that Mr. Smith was innocent. Mr. Buckley had described Mr. Smith in the 1965 Esquire article as an “an essentially phlegmatic young man of nonviolent habits.”

Edgar Herbert Smith Jr. was nothing like that. Born in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., he was angry when his parents separated when he was a boy, and angry at being shuttled from an aunt to an orphanage to a grandmother, he recalled at a 2009 parole hearing.

When he was 12, he broke into a house, and when he was 14, he was charged with molesting a 9-year-old girl. Both cases were handled in juvenile court. He dropped out of high school, spent time in the Marine Corps, then drifted from job to job. On the day Victoria was killed, he was fired from his job at an auto-muffler shop.

After his 1971 appearance on “Firing Line,” Mr. Smith moved to California. He married and divorced a second time and drank heavily.

On Oct. 1, 1976, he abducted a 33-year-old San Diego woman and stabbed her as she struggled to escape his car. Bystanders noted the license plate number, leading the police to Mr. Smith’s apartment. By that time, he had fled to the East. But he decided to turn himself in and flew to Las Vegas, where he was arrested by F.B.I. agents. Mr. Buckley helped arrange the surrender and later expressed regret at having championed Mr. Smith’s cause.

In a nonjury trial, Mr. Smith was convicted of attempted murder and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison.

William F. Buckley at rally at Madison Square Garden, 1968, New York City. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, [Reproduction number e.g., LC-USZ62-12345] “In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition,” wrote the literary critic Lionel Trilling in 1950. “For it is the plain fact that…