BATON ROUGE — A Baton Rouge man was sentenced to 70 years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to manslaughter and other charges connected to the stabbing death of his girlfriend in 2020.

Connor Regan had called police after stabbing Kinnedy Smith 39 times inside a Jefferson Highway apartment on June 6, 2020. He was apprehended in Crowley after setting out for Texas.

Regan, then 27, and Smith, 21, had dated for about 16 months. The Advocate at the time of the killing reported that Regan had been accused of beating Smith in Pointe Coupee Parish in 2019 but never took part in a pre-trial diversion program that would have included domestic violence counseling.

Smith was dead seven months later.

In court Wednesday, Regan was sentenced to no more than 40 years for manslaughter, with no appeal rights. He also was sentenced to 15 years each for obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence. He had been accused of second-degree murder, which carries a mandatory life term, but reached a deal with prosecutors.

"We did this in the best interest of this case," District Attorney Hillar Moore III said. "We were concerned the documented mental health this individual had could possibly lead to a lesser verdict that would not really reflect how bad this incident really was."

Generally, receiving a term of years allows for the possibility of parole much later, but Moore was confident Regan will never be freed.

"We were guaranteed 70 years and we believe 70 years equates to a life sentence," he said.

Absent Regan's mental issues, Smith's family likely would have preferred something stronger.

"I assume they would have, like me, preferred a life sentence, or a death sentence, for this gentleman," Moore said.

East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore provided the following statement:

"This was a very heinous crime which took the life of a very young lady who had a promising future. While I feel as do all involved in this case that this defendant deserved a life sentence, our concerns were with the 4,367 pages of documented mental health records that we believe had a significant chance of being presented at trial and used to successfully sway a jury to a manslaughter conviction, which would have resulted in a maximum sentence of 40 years. Because of the potential my office allowed this defendant to plead to manslaughter plus two counts of obstruction of justice for a total of 70 years. This plea and sentence guaranteed that this defendant would remain behind bars and the public protected essentially for the rest of his life."