Apostrophe following HTML tag goes wrong way

[CNG]

I noticed a bunch of my apostrophes are wrong in a Pelican site, and I traced it to this module.

>>> smartypants.smartypants("I'm with <a>The Badger Herald</a>'s web department.")
'I&#8217;m with <a>The Badger Herald</a>&#8216;s web department.'

The Perl SmartyPants (built into my Movable Type CMS) correctly renders:

The Badger Herald’s

This Python version 2.0.1 renders:

The Badger Herald‘s