Pamela Smart, serving life, seeks a new trial as a New Hampshire judge weighs her latest petition
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Lawyers for Pamela Smart, who is serving life in prison for orchestrating the murder of her husband by her teenage student in 1990, urged a New Hampshire judge Monday to allow her latest petition for a new trial to move forward.
Smart, 58, was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry.
The shooter was freed in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Though Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and other crimes and was sentenced to life without parole after a trial that was one of the first in the nation to be broadcast live on television from start to finish.
Smart filed a petition for habeas corpus relief in January seeking to overturn her conviction over what her lawyers claim were several constitutional violations. The state responded with a motion to dismiss the petition, resulting in Monday's hearing, which Smart attended remotely from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York.
Merrimack County Superior Court Judge James Kennedy took the matter under advisement. He planned to rule in 30 to 60 days.
Smart's lawyers argue that prosecutors misled the jury by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations of Smart that included words that were not audible on the recordings.
Among the words they claim weren’t audible but in the transcript were the word “killed” in the sentence “you had your husband killed,” the word “busted” in the sentence “I’m gonna be busted” and the word “murder” in the sentence “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, said in a statement earlier this year. “Jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently — they were being directed toward a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict.”
In court Monday, he described a forensic study that showed providing transcripts alongside muffled audio leads listeners to believe the written text even when inaccurate.
“Adding a transcript of language to the jurors changed their interpretation of what they believed they were hearing, how confident they were in what they believed they were hearing and how clear it was to them,” he said. “There's no absolute truth about what's on the tapes. Nothing decipherable is on the tapes. But when you tell someone what they're hearing, you set this expectation ... and they will hear it.”
Smart's lawyers also argued that the verdict was tainted by the media attention and due to faulty instructions to the jury. They argued jurors were told they must find that Smart acted with premeditation, and were not told they must consider only evidence presented at trial.
They also argued the trial court gave her a mandatory life sentence without parole for being an accomplice to first-degree murder, despite New Hampshire not mandating that sentence for the charge.
Lawyers for the state asked the judge to dismiss the petition, saying nearly all of the claims are barred because they already were raised on appeal and resolved by the New Hampshire Supreme Court, or could have been raised on appeal with the court but were not.
They noted that during Smart's trial, the defense only expressed concern that the recording transcripts allegedly failed to account for the “doubling” of voices when two people speak at once. The judge instructed jurors that if the tapes differed from what they were reading, they should use what they heard, instead. The state Supreme Court noted that Smart's lawyers did not make any “particularized showing of inaccuracies in the transcripts relative to the recordings or how she may have been prejudiced” by them.
Assistant Attorney General John Drennan said none of Smart's claims are supported by facts, and that she appears to be using the habeas corpus process as a substitute for an appeal. He likened the discrepancies with the transcripts to someone viewing text of a transcribed voicemail and then listening to the actual message.
“Maybe cognitive bias has set in, but it doesn't mean that I can't, when listening, say, ‘Hey, I’m not sure that's right,'” he said. “I know to review it. I know to be skeptical.”
Smart's team hasn't proven other claims, such as ineffective assistance of counsel and having the case argued in New York, rather than in New Hampshire, the lawyers for the state said.
Smart's legal options are limited. She has unsuccessfully sought a sentence reduction hearing several times with an elected state council in New Hampshire that approves contracts and appointees to the courts and state agencies. She appealed one rejection to the state Supreme Court, which dismissed her petition in 2023.
Her latest petition was filed after New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte rejected her request last year to put the matter before the council again. Ayotte said she reviewed the case and decided it was not deserving of a hearing.
In 2024, Smart took full responsibility for her husband’s death. She said in a video she spent years deflecting blame “almost as if it was a coping mechanism.”
Smart’s trial was a media circus and one of America’s first high-profile cases about a sexual affair between a school employee and a student. The student, William Flynn, testified that Smart told him she needed her husband killed because she feared she would lose everything if they divorced and that she threatened to break up with him if he didn’t kill her husband. Flynn and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors and all have since been released.
Flynn and 17-year-old Patrick Randall entered the Smarts’ Derry condominium and forced Gregory Smart to his knees in the foyer. 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. They were granted parole in 2015. Two other teenagers served prison sentences and have been released.
The case inspired Joyce Maynard’s 1992 book “To Die For” and the 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.
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