A Gloucester County judge heard arguments on Aug. 7 over whether Wendell Smallwood Jr. can withdraw a guilty plea and open a path to temporary release from prison so he can see his dying daughter. The hearing put the former Philadelphia Eagles running back’s fate, and the fate of 8-year-old Mila, before Gloucester County Superior Court Judge Renard Scott in Woodbury, New Jersey.
Smallwood, 33, is serving time on a federal sentence for COVID-19 loan fraud and a separate state sentence tied to a New Jersey gun case. His daughter, Mila, was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year and is now in palliative care. Doctors say she may have only days or weeks to live, and his lawyer, Yaron Helmer, told the court, “They can’t do anything except make her comfortable now.”
The packed courtroom reflected how personal the legal fight has become. Dozens of family members, friends and neighbors came to Woodbury to watch Helmer and a county prosecutor argue over whether Smallwood should be allowed to undo the plea that underpins the gun case. The question matters because Smallwood is already eligible to get out on his federal sentence, but a detention order tied to the state case could still keep him behind bars through November.
That overlap is what gives the hearing its weight. Smallwood pleaded guilty to possessing an AR-15 rifle that was locked in a basement safe at his New Jersey home, and state law made possession of that weapon illegal. He bought the gun legally while living in Pennsylvania, and Helmer has argued that a recent 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals decision finding New Jersey’s ban on guns such as AR-15s unconstitutional under the Second Amendment creates a “colorable claim of innocence.”
There is still a catch. The appeals court later paused the effect of that ruling, leaving Smallwood to lean on an opening that may not stay open long enough to help him. That is why the August hearing mattered so much: not as a broad test of gun policy, but as a race against time for a father trying to reach his child before her condition worsens. Helmer said, “This is not just a matter of legal semantics,” and added, “It’s about whether his daughter will hold her dad again.”
Whether Scott granted the request was not clear from the hearing itself, but the next move is obvious: his ruling will determine whether Smallwood can keep fighting from inside prison, or whether the separate state order continues to hold him past the point when Mila may have any time left at all.
