Martell Smith stood at the front of an Allegheny County courtroom Thursday with his legs shackled and a leather belt around his waist, securing his hands.

He was no longer presumed to be innocent.

Less than an hour earlier, a jury of seven men and five women had found Smith guilty of second-degree murder for killing three people in a house fire in Homewood in 2017.

Despite the consequences of the jurors’ finding — second-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance for parole — they spared Smith from what prosecutors were seeking: the death penalty.

But Smith wasn’t grateful.

“I’m innocent,” he told Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jill E. Rangos. “I understand they need somebody to pay for the crime, and everything lined up for me to be that person. I’m just another in a long line of Black men sent to the correctional system to die there.

“Life in prison is the death penalty. It’s just slower.”

Investigators said that Smith started the fire just after 2 a.m. on Dec. 20, 2017, at the home where Rico Carter lived on Bennett Street in Homewood.

Carter and Smith had both been at a Penn Hills bar earlier that night and, after a confrontation inside, Carter and a friend assaulted Smith outside.

Carter punched Smith several times, bloodying his face, tearing his shirt and breaking his chain.

Smith was so incensed, the prosecution told the jury, that he stopped at a Sunoco station on his way home, bought a one-gallon gas can, filled it and went to Carter’s house.

Smith went inside, poured the gas on a couch in the living room and set it on fire.

Carter’s mother Sandra Carter Douglas, 58, his girlfriend Shamira Staten, 21, and her 4-year-old daughter Ch’yenne Manning were killed. Carter’s stepfather Cecil Douglas jumped from a third-floor window to escape the fire, breaking a leg.

Rico Carter wasn’t home.

Witnesses in the neighborhood watching the house burn heard Smith, 45, who had lived in Homewood but was staying in Beltzhoover, walking through the crowd, bragging about having committed the crime.

They told the police, and he was arrested later that day.

Smith’s trial began on Sept. 12. Jurors heard testimony from 32 witnesses over eight days. They reviewed 385 exhibits and watched hours of video footage.

Then, after deliberating for about six hours over two days, they returned with their verdict just before lunch on Thursday.

As the verdict was read, Smith stared at the jurors as if in disbelief, his mouth slowly falling open. He physically appeared to deflate, and hung his head in his hands.

As the forewoman continued reading each count, Smith appeared to fall ill, taking off his suit jacket, wiping his face with a wet paper towel and lying across the counsel table.

As the jurors were polled individually to ensure they agreed with the verdict, Smith mouthed to them, “I didn’t do it.”

He asked to be sentenced immediately.

Defense attorney Michael Machen told the court that his client was among the most polite that he’d ever had.

He called him “a gentle soul.”

Smith told the court that his father was murdered when he was an infant, but his mother raised him well and in the church.

Still, he said he was part of the “prison pipeline.”

Smith said two people tried to kill him when he was 17, so he shot them. He was sent to prison for 7-1/2 to 15 years.

“I did every last day of that,” he said. “I just wanted to come home and live my life.”

Smith said he battled addiction and depression. The night Rico Carter punched him outside the bar, Smith said, he didn’t do anything back.

“I didn’t retaliate. I didn’t burn down their house, and here I stand.”

‘She really made you feel special’

Cecil Douglas met his wife, Sandy, when they were in grade school more than 40 years ago, he told the court. They were childhood sweethearts, and she was his first date to Kennywood.

They married on Jan. 20, 1993.

In a victim-impact statement read by Deputy District Attorney Brian Catanzarite, Douglas said his wife loved kids and was nurturing, colorful and funny.

“Although she wasn’t very good at it, she really liked to play pool,” Douglas wrote. “She also liked to play dominoes — and it wasn’t unusual to catch her cheating in order to beat me.”

She loved to cook and was good at it.

“But what I miss most about her,” her husband wrote, “is her warmth and attentiveness. She really made you feel special.”

Douglas said it has been hard to try to move on, and that he is in therapy for trauma.

“I never thought it would be an incident like this that would destroy an entire family’s dreams,” he said. “The ripple effect is broad.”

Lasandra Hawthorne told the court that she desperately misses her mom, Sandra Carter Douglas.

“I can’t imagine the thoughts that ran through her mind when she realized the only way out was to jump out of the third-floor window,” Hawthorne told the court.

Since the fire, Carter Douglas missed her granddaughter’s high school and college graduations, as well as the birth of her great-granddaughter.

“I feel like no one in this world loved me as much as my mother loved me,” Hawthorne said.

‘What did they do to deserve this?’

“I lost everything,” Rico Carter began his letter. “My mother, my girlfriend and my stepdaughter.”

“I lost my house, my job, sometimes I even feel like I have lost my mind trying to learn how to live without people you love.”

Ch’yenne Manning had just started learning how to read. Shamira Staten’s sister, Ayauna Staten, described Ch’yenne as a happy baby who was beloved at her daycare. Her favorite activity was painting.

“What did they do to deserve this?” asked Ayauna Staten.

Carter wrote that there are days when he can’t get out of bed, and that he’s angry all the time. He used to talk to Shamira Staten all night and laugh. Now, he can’t move on because he constantly thinks of her.

“I actually tried to pray, but honestly, I don’t really know what to believe in now,” he wrote. “Sometimes, I feel like I can’t live without them.”

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