COLUMBIA, S.C. — Susan Smith, the mother who shocked the nation three decades ago when she drove her car into a lake with her two young sons inside and watched them drown, was released on parole Wednesday.

Smith, 53, pleaded for release via video link from prison. She had to convince a simple majority on the seven-member panel that, after three decades behind bars, she was ready to rejoin society.

The panel unanimously voted no.

Before the parole board ruled, a tearful Smith acknowledged that what she had done to three-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex “was horrible.”

“I’d give anything if I could go back and change it,” she said, taking off her glasses and wiping her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough. I know they’re just words, but they come from my heart.’

Smith acknowledged that she hasn’t always been a model prisoner behind bars. But in closing, she said, “I am a Christian and I know God has forgiven me.”

When it was his turn to speak, Smith’s ex-husband and the boys’ father, David Smith, urged the board to deny her request for parole. He was flanked by still-grieving family members and several members of the legal team that prosecuted Smith. They all wore pins with the pictures of the two little boys on them.

“It’s been a tough 30 years,” David Smith said, emphasizing that he was there to stand up for their dead sons. “This was not a tragic mistake… She deliberately wanted to end their lives.”

And the time Smith has already served is “simply not enough,” he said.

“So I ask you today to please deny her parole,” David Smith said.

Smith’s bid for freedom came nearly three decades to the day after she falsely claimed she was carjacked late at night near Union, South Carolina, by a black man who drove away with Michael and Alex in the car.

Her false claims attracted massive media attention and led to a nine-day manhunt during which she and David Smith, her then-estranged husband, advocated on national television for the boys’ safe return.

“As a mother, it’s just a natural instinct to protect your children from all harm, and the hardest part of this whole ordeal is not knowing if your children are going to get what they need to survive and that hurts,” Smith said on NBC’s TODAY show.

But just hours after that interview on November 3, 1994, Smith confessed to killing her sons.

At her trial the following year, prosecutors argued that Smith killed them because the wealthy man she was having an affair with suggested they could not be together because he did not want children.

Her lawyers argued that she was the victim of sexual assault by her stepfather and that she suffered a nervous breakdown when she killed her sons.

Smith was found guilty of murder and the jury sentenced her to life in prison with the possibility of parole after serving 30 years, although prosecutors had sought the death penalty.

At a press conference after the hearing Wednesday, David Smith said his ex-wife will be paroled again in two years and that he will oppose it.

“At least I know she’ll be behind bars for now,” he said.

From her prison cell, Smith continued to claim she was a good mother.

In a 2015 letter to The State newspaper in South Carolina, she wrote: “That evening something went very wrong. I wasn’t myself. I was a good mother and I loved my boys… There was no motive because it wasn’t even a planned event. I wasn’t in my right mind… I’m not the monster that society thinks I am.”

Smith also has a poor record in prison, including multiple disciplinary actions.

Her first offense occurred in 1997 when she was caught with contraband, a razor.

In 2000, Smith was transferred from the Women’s Correctional Center after two prison guards pleaded guilty to sexual encounters with her.

The following year, Smith broke the rules by not running for office and was locked up in her cell for 45 days. According to the South Carolina Department of Corrections, in 2010 and 2015 she was punished with disciplinary detention and the loss of cafeteria privileges for using drugs, including marijuana.

Arguing that she should be released on parole, Smith’s attorney Tommy A. Thomas argued that she was a changed woman who survived several suicide attempts while behind bars and overcame the “stigma” surrounding mental health care to seek treatment for her depression to get.

Thomas agreed that Smith’s crime was “heinous” but said her father’s suicide when she was six years old “set the stage for a severe depression” that “ended” in tragedy. He then read a passage Smith wrote explaining why she killed her sons.

“I knew Jesus would take better care of them than I did,” Smith wrote, according to Thomas.

But, Thomas added, while Smith deserves to be released on parole, “I don’t think she’ll ever be able to forgive herself.”

Tommy Pope, the Republican speaker of the South Carolina House who prosecuted Smith, strongly disagreed. “Susan always focuses on Susan,” he said.

Juliette Arcodia reported from Columbia, SC, Corky Siemaszko reported from New York City