Abbe Smith

A criminal lawyer will be in St. Louis Thursday to discuss her book about a woman wrongfully imprisoned for almost 30 years.

Lawyer Abbe Smith’s book is called “Case of a Lifetime.”

She’ll speak at 5 p.m. Thursday (Nov. 20) for the Criminal Justice Series at St. Louis University School. A free book signing is at 4 p.m. in the Law
School, 3700 Lindell Blvd. (314-977-2704). The talk is in the school’s William H. Kniep Courtroom.

Smith spent decades on the case of Patsy Kelly Jarrett, a woman from North Carolina who was convicted of  robbing and murdering a gas station attendant in upstate New York.

Smith met Jarrett in 1980 when she was a law student. Jarrett had been sentenced to life in prison for driving the getaway car in the 1973 murder, but she said that although she knew the robber, she was never near him at the time of the crime.

When Jarrett was paroled in 2005, she was one of the  longest-serving women in the New York prison system.

 “It remains the most haunting miscarriage of justice I  have ever encountered,” Smith, a professor at Georgetown Law School, says.
Information on the book: www://us.macmillan.com/caseofalifetime.