Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother convicted of murdering her two children in 1994, was released on parole on Wednesday, November 20. The Washington Post report.

Susan appeared before the parole board Wednesday morning and said, “I know what I did was terrible,” CNN reported.

She reportedly added: “I’m a Christian and God is a big part of my life and I know he has forgiven me and I know it’s by his grace and mercy… And I just ask you for that same kind of grace also to show.”

Before her hearing, Smith’s husband discussed his feelings toward Susan on Wednesday morning. In an interview with the Today show on Wednesday, David Smith said he doesn’t think Susan should be released on parole after serving 30 years of a life sentence for the drowning deaths of their two sons, who were 3 and 14 months old. He said it “wasn’t an accident. ‘ and that she ‘intentionally killed’ the boys.

“I don’t think she will ever be rehabilitated,” he told the news station. “I don’t think, even for me, she’s ever really regretted what she did.”

On October 25, 1994, Susan, then 23, told police she had been carjacked by a black man who took off with her two young sons still in her car. For nine days, she made tearful pleas on national television for their safe return. But it was all a lie.

As her story began to unravel, Susan admitted that there was no car thief and that she had rolled her car into a lake while Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months, were still strapped into their car seats. Authorities said she committed the murders because she was secretly dating a man who did not want children.

The story became international news and was featured on the cover of PEOPLE. Susan was convicted of two murders in 1995 and is serving a life sentence at Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood, SC

David also shared the dark thoughts he had in court during Susan’s trial Today show that he “sat there and looked at the back of her head and then looked at where the bailiffs were, the officers were and thought about killing her,” according to the outlet.

During her time behind bars, Susan received disciplinary violations for self-harm, drug use and possession of narcotics or marijuana, and as a result lost multiple privileges, according to records previously obtained by PEOPLE.

She was also disciplined for having sex with a prison guard, Houston Cagle, in 2000 and with a prison captain, Alfred Rowe, the following year. (Cagle pleaded guilty and spent three months in jail, and Rowe also pleaded guilty to having sex with Smith and was sentenced to five years’ probation.)

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In 2015, Susan, who claimed she was misunderstood, defended herself in a letter to The statea newspaper from South Carolina.

“Mr. Cahill, I am not the monster society thinks I am,” she wrote to reporter Harrison Cahill. “I’m far from it.”

As for David, he previously said in an interview with Court TV that he has forgiven Susan, but it doesn’t make the pain of losing their sons any easier.

“Yes, I have forgiven her, but again, that has to do with my faith in God and that is how I was raised. We have to forgive that,” David told Court TV presenter Julie Grant in September. “But it certainly doesn’t diminish the act of what she did. It doesn’t make it any less, it doesn’t make it any easier. But I have forgiven her for what she did.”