Smith, a baldheaded black man with a short, graying beard and a nose that looks as if it had been broken more than once, worked as a cook in San Quentin prison. He hadn’t had a serious disciplinary violation in two decades but was denied parole in each of his eight hearings since becoming eligible in 1996, receiving three-year denials each time. (Every parole denial comes with a prescribed length of time — three, five, seven, 10 or 15 years — before the inmate is allowed to try again.) Inmates can petition to have their hearing dates moved up; his most recent hearing was just a year and a half earlier. Since then, he had studied the transcript carefully, highlighting the parts that told him what he needed to do to increase his chances of parole. He had to participate in self-help groups that focused especially on three things: gangs, overcoming criminal thinking and the suffering of crime victims. The commissioners, he felt, were trying to help him. “I know exactly what she was trying to tell me,” he said, referring to the commissioner who presided over his last hearing. “She’s trying to make sure that I don’t go out there and fall into the hands of the same people that I dealt with when I came here, which is understandable.”

Smith had gone to some of the recommended groups, but he hadn’t taken to them the way Morgan had. He wasn’t particularly introspective by nature, and he had trouble presenting a board-friendly narrative of his life or remembering the definition of jargony self-help words like “prosocial.” In conversation, he tended to skitter away from the traumatic events that might have explained how he wound up committing crimes — the best friend who was killed by a speeding car right in front of him when he was 5, his father’s absence, his stepfather’s emotional abuse of his mother, the varsity football career that ended when he got hit by a car in high school. “The way I was brought up, some things you just don’t speak on,” he told me.

He preferred to talk about other matters: his plans for the future with his grown daughter and 9-year-old granddaughter and goddaughter; his ignorance of the basics of the modern world after so long in prison (he didn’t know, he confessed, how to use a microwave oven); the old friends who were law-abiding citizens now. The story he had to tell was straightforward: He’d been a hardheaded young man once, but he had been a model inmate for more than two decades. Now he hoped to return to his old neighborhoods and talk to youngsters who were as hardheaded as he used to be. “I want to go back out there,” he said. “I want to help bring my community back up.”

Neither his good intentions nor his clean prison record were enough to get him a parole date, however. “I’m getting denied for what we consider as being little things — you know, insight, you’re not showing remorse,” he told me over the phone shortly before his ninth parole hearing. Those “little things,” of course, were the very things the parole board considered paramount, but a lot of the board’s preoccupations seemed illogical to Smith. It had taken him a long time to understand why the authorities considered his group of associates to be a gang — a word he associated with large criminal organizations — or why he would be guilty of murder when the victim was shot by someone else. He said he thought about Terry Brown’s murder every day, but it was hard to access his feelings sometimes, particularly in the hearing room. Each time he went before the board, Smith ended up tongue-tied and inarticulate. But was that indicative of the future danger he posed to the public?

“The parole process is like threading a needle — the people who have come out through the parole board are extraordinary people,” says Rummel, who has represented hundreds of lifers in their parole hearings. “We could swing the door a little wider. They don’t have to be A-plus human beings. They could be B-plus human beings.”

Smith’s ninth parole hearing was on May 9, 2018. He sat at a table with his state-appointed lawyer, Marc Gardner, his back to a window whose vertical blinds, wavering in the breeze, offered tantalizing glimpses of the sparkling San Francisco Bay. His feet tapped nervously beneath the table. The presiding commissioner, Patricia Cassady, pressed him for explanations, just as previous commissioners had: Why had he been a bully in school? Why had he liked fighting? Why did he join a gang?

Smith’s answers were short and uninformative. He spoke with his forehead furrowed, his expression pained and puzzled, as the commissioners guided him through various episodes of childhood delinquency — stealing bikes, cutting school — until they arrived at the crime he was incarcerated for, the botched attempt at a revenge killing of a rival gang member. Smith’s crew had been trying to sneak up on the apartment where the man was hiding out, but Smith, who said he didn’t know much about firearms, had accidentally fired his weapon into the ground, triggering the shootout. Brown was hospitalized for 15 months before he died.