Kathy Smith Carpenter isn’t looking forward to reliving her brother’s murder in a hearing today before the S.C. Supreme Court.

“If this had been a couple weeks later, this wouldn’t have mattered,” the Pelzer woman said.

Eric Dale Morgan was 16 days shy of turning 18 when, on May 3, 2000, authorities said he shot and killed Jerry Smith, 57, during a robbery at the family’s convenience store in Woodruff in Spartanburg County.

In 2004, Morgan was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

But his death sentence was set aside last year when the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark ruling said executing defendants who were younger than 18 at the time of their crimes was unconstitutional.

At least five S.C. cases, including Morgan’s, were affected.

Now, the S.C. Supreme Court will decide in Morgan’s case whether he should be resentenced to life without parole or receive a lesser sentence. His appeal is the first involving the sentencing issue.

The court will issue a ruling after today’s hearing; typically, decisions are made within several months.

The now 23-year-old Morgan could get as little as 30 years under sentencing laws for murder.

Carpenter believes Morgan should spend the rest of his life in prison without the chance of parole.

“This was not just a robbery gone wrong,” she said. “This was very well-planned, well-orchestrated.”

Joseph Savitz, the state’s chief appellate defense lawyer representing Morgan, said state law doesn’t automatically call for a life-without-parole sentence if the death penalty is no longer applicable.

“Juveniles who commit much worse crimes than Eric Dale Morgan routinely receive sentences of something less than life without parole,” he said last week.

Trey Gowdy, the 7th Circuit solicitor who prosecuted Morgan, said he understands Morgan’s position from a legal standpoint.

But he said Morgan deserves life without parole and he does not think any judge would resentence him to anything fewer than 40 years — the sentence received by Morgan’s younger accomplice, Robert Brandon Duncan. Though convicted of murder, Duncan wasn’t the triggerman, Gowdy said.

“That would be the beginning point for Eric’s sentence, and you could expect it to go up from there,” Gowdy said.

Morgan and then 16-year-old Duncan, who had begun a part-time job at the Max Saver convenience store on S.C. 101, wanted to rob the store by blowing off the doors with a pipe bomb, police said.

But the plot fell apart when they confronted Smith in the store parking lot, authorities said. Smith had just put $7,068 in store money in a brown paper bag and closed the store when Morgan shot him with a .22-caliber rifle, authorities said.

After the shooting, Smith was put in his Lincoln Town Car and abandoned in a field.

Carpenter said she always supported the death sentence for Morgan, even though it no longer is an option. She couldn’t imagine that her brother was able to fight back in the robbery.

“My brother wore a hearing aid and had arthritis real bad,” she said.

Her brother’s murder wasn’t the family’s first experience with violence. In 1994, another brother, Mendal “Dickie” Smith, 43, was gunned down at the family’s store in Simpsonville.

Shawn Paul Humphries, then 22, was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed last month in Columbia after exhausting his appeals.

Carpenter witnessed the execution. She said today’s hearing in Columbia will bring up more bad memories.

“I don’t understand why it happened twice to our family, but maybe there’s something that we can be doing to voice change,” she said.

Reach Brundrett at (803) 771-8484 or rbrundrett@thestate.com.