Convicted killer pardoned by former Gov. Bevin charged with attacking woman with knife

A Kentucky man previously pardoned in 2019 by former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin after killing his infant son was charged Thursday with attacking a woman with a knife in Lexington.

Kurt Smith, 40, is accused of assaulting the woman while she was cleaning his Georgetown Street home on Aug. 16. She was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, required surgery on her arm and has lacerations to her head and wrist.

Smith attacked the woman after she found a large amount of blood in the bathroom of Smith’s home and told him to call someone for help, court documents show. The records do not indicate whose blood was in the bathroom.

Smith eventually dropped the woman off at Saint Joseph hospital, and she identified him as the attacker through photos.

Smith was one of hundreds of prisoners to receive controversial pardons just before Bevin left office in 2019. At the time, Smith was serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 20 years for killing his 6-week-old son in 2001, when he was 17.

In his final hours in office after his narrow loss in November 2019 to Democrat Andy Beshear, Bevin issued roughly 425 pardons and commutations before leaving office.

The beneficiaries, according to the Courier Journal , include one offender convicted of raping a child, another who hired a hit man to kill his business partner and a third who killed his parents.

Bevin’s pardon allowed Smith to be released from prison. Bevin said at the time he had been “duly punished for his criminal actions.”

“I am confident that he will become a productive member of society and encourage him to use his life experience to educate and help others,’ Bevin said in the Dec. 6, 2019, order.

While in prison, Smith participated in a prison riot at Northpoint Training Center near Danville in 2009. Inmates set fires that destroyed six buildings and damaged others.

Several inmates and correctional officers were injured in the melee. It reportedly cost more than $18 million to rebuild the prison.

Smith pleaded guilty to one count of third-degree assault and one count of taking part in the riot as part of a deal for a five-year sentence to be served at the same time as the life sentence from the murder conviction.

Smith is being held at the Fayette County Detention Center on a $25,000 bond, according to jail records.