Pamela Smart seeks to overturn conviction for having teenager murder her husband
BOSTON (AP) — Pamela SmartSentenced to life in prison in 1990 for orchestrating the murder of her husband by his teenage student, she is seeking to overturn her conviction for what her lawyers argue are various constitutional violations.
The petition for relief of habeas corpus was filed Monday in New York, New Hampshire, where she was held at Bedford Hills Correctional Center for Women and where the murder took place.
“Ms. Smart’s case unfolded in an environment no court had ever encountered before; wall-to-wall media coverage that blurred the lines between allegations and evidence,” Jason Ott, a member of Smart’s legal team, said in a statement. “This petition questions whether a fair adversarial process occurred.”
The move comes about seven months later New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte He rejected the request for a sentence reduction hearing. Ayotte said he reviewed the case and decided it did not deserve a hearing.
A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for the New Hampshire attorney general’s office said it would not comment on pending litigation “other than to state that the State received a fair trial and that the convictions were lawfully obtained and affirmed on appeal.”
Lawyers for Smart, 57, argue in their petition that prosecutors misled the jury by providing inaccurate transcripts of Ms. Smart’s secretly recorded conversations that contained words not heard on the recordings. Although the words they claimed were not heard, the report included the word murdered in the sentence “You killed your husband”, the word printed in the sentence “I will be caught”, and the word murder in the sentence “This would be the perfect murder”.
“Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: When people are given a scenario, they inevitably hear the words shown to them,” Smart’s attorney, Matthew Zernhelt, said in a statement. “Jurors were not evaluating the record independently; they were being guided toward a conclusion, and that direction determined the verdict.”
The attorneys also argued that the conviction should be overturned because the verdict was tainted by media attention and faulty instructions given to the jury. They argued that jurors were told they had to find that Smart acted with premeditation, but not that they had to consider only the evidence presented at trial.
They also argued that the trial court gave him a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for being an accessory to first-degree murder, even though New Hampshire did not mandate that sentence for the charge.
Smart was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she became involved with a 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry. The attacker was released in 2015 after a 25-year prison sentence. Although Smart denied knowledge of the conspiracy, he was convicted of accessory to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
It took until 2024 for Smart to take full responsibility for her husband’s death. In a video released in June, he said he spent years deflecting blame “as if it was a coping mechanism.”
Smart’s case was a media circus and one of America’s first high-profile cases involving a sexual relationship between a school employee and a student. Student William Flynn testified that Smart told him she wanted her husband killed because she was afraid she would lose everything if they divorced and threatened to leave him if she didn’t kill him. Flynn and three other teenagers cooperated with prosecutors and all were later released.
Flynn and 17-year-old Patrick Randall broke into the Smarts’ Derry apartment and forced Gregory Smart to his knees in the entryway. As Randall held a knife to the man’s throat, Flynn fired a hollow-point bullet into his head. Both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. He was granted parole in 2015. The other two young people were sentenced to prison and released.
The case inspired Joyce Maynard’s 1992 book “To Die For” and the 1995 movie of the same name starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.
