New Hampshire Judge Rejects Pamela Smart's Latest Bid for New Trial
The judge cited a lack of merit and the ability to raise arguments in earlier appeals for dismissing Smart's habeas corpus petition.
A New Hampshire judge has dismissed Pamela Smart's latest petition for a new trial, upholding her life sentence for orchestrating her husband's murder over three decades ago.
Merrimack County Superior Court Judge James Kennedy ruled Thursday that Smart's arguments lacked merit and could have been raised during previous appeals. Smart, 59, is serving a life sentence without parole for her role in the 1990 murder of her husband, Gregory Smart. She was convicted in 1991 of being an accomplice to first-degree murder.
Smart's petition for habeas corpus relief, filed in January, sought to overturn her conviction based on claims of constitutional violations. Her lawyers argued that prosecutors misled the jury by providing inaccurate transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations between Smart and her then-15-year-old student intern. The transcripts allegedly included words not audible on the recordings, such as "killed" in the sentence "you had your husband killed."
Smart's lawyers presented a forensic study suggesting that juries might believe inaccurate transcripts when paired with muffled audio. However, Judge Kennedy deemed the study's legal relevance "dubious," noting it was not fully published and that Smart's attorneys failed to identify specific inaccuracies.
The judge also rejected Smart's arguments that her trial was tainted by excessive media attention and faulty jury instructions. Smart's trial was notably one of the first in the nation to be broadcast live on television from start to finish, drawing significant media scrutiny.
Smart, then a 22-year-old media coordinator, began an affair with the student, William Flynn. Flynn testified that Smart told him she feared losing everything if they divorced and threatened to end their relationship if he did not kill her husband. Flynn, along with three other teens involved in the plot, cooperated with prosecutors and have since been released from prison. Flynn was freed in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence.
Smart denied knowledge of the murder plot at the time but later, in 2024, took responsibility for her husband's death, stating she spent years deflecting blame as a coping mechanism.
The case gained national attention and was the subject of Joyce Maynard's 1992 book "To Die For," which was adapted into a 1995 film starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.