Lawyers for Pamela Smart, who is serving a life sentence for orchestrating her husband's 1990 murder, are seeking a new trial, asserting that her conviction was marred by constitutional violations. A New Hampshire judge is considering her latest petition.
Smart, who was 22 and working as a high school media coordinator at the time of the crime, was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder in the death of her husband, Gregory Smart. The murder was carried out by a 15-year-old student with whom she was having an affair. Her trial was one of the first in the nation to be fully broadcast on live television.
The shooter, William Flynn, was released in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Smart has maintained she had no knowledge of the plot, but she was ultimately sentenced to life without parole.
Her current petition for habeas corpus relief, filed in January, challenges her conviction based on several alleged constitutional infringements. Smart, 58, is permitted to attend the hearing remotely from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York.
Central to her lawyers' argument is the claim that prosecutors presented jurors with inaccurate transcripts of secretly recorded conversations involving Smart. They contend that these transcripts included words not present in the audio recordings, potentially misleading the jury. Specifically, the transcripts allegedly contained words like "killed," "busted," and "murder" in sentences that were not clearly audible in the recordings, such as "you had your husband killed," "I’m gonna be busted," and "this would have been the perfect murder."
"Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: when people are handed a script, they inevitably hear the words they are shown," Smart’s attorney, Matthew Zernhelt, stated earlier this year. "Jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently — they were being directed toward a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict."
Smart's legal team also argues that the intense media coverage surrounding the trial and what they describe as faulty jury instructions tainted the verdict. They assert that jurors were wrongly told they must find Smart acted with premeditation and were not properly instructed to consider only evidence presented during the trial.
Furthermore, the petition claims that the mandatory life sentence without parole imposed on Smart for her accomplice role in first-degree murder was improper, as New Hampshire law did not mandate such a sentence for that charge at the time.
In response, the state's lawyers have requested the petition be dismissed, arguing that most of the claims have already been addressed and resolved by the New Hampshire Supreme Court on appeal, or could have been raised but were not. They noted that during the original trial, the defense only raised concerns about the recording transcripts potentially misrepresenting overlapping speech. The trial judge had instructed jurors to rely on the audio if it differed from the transcript. The state Supreme Court previously found that Smart's defense did not provide a "particularized showing of inaccuracies in the transcripts relative to the recordings or how she may have been prejudiced" by them.
The state also contends that Smart's team has failed to substantiate other claims, such as ineffective assistance of counsel and the argument that the case should have been tried in New York instead of New Hampshire.
Smart has exhausted other legal avenues, including several unsuccessful attempts to seek a sentence reduction hearing before the New Hampshire State Council, which approves contracts and court appointments. An appeal of one rejection was dismissed by the state Supreme Court in 2023.
Her latest petition follows New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte's rejection last year of her request to bring the matter before the council again, with Ayotte stating she reviewed the case and found it not deserving of a hearing.
In 2024, Smart publicly took responsibility for her husband's death, describing her years of deflecting blame as a coping mechanism. The case, which highlighted an affair between a school employee and a student, inspired the 1992 book "To Die For" by Joyce Maynard and the subsequent 1995 film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman.