Pamela Smart seeks to overturn conviction for having teenager murder her husband

BOSTON– BOSTON (AP) — Pamela Smart, who is serving a life sentence for orchestrating the murder of her husband by his teenage student in 1990, is seeking to overturn her conviction for what her lawyers say are several constitutional violations.

The habeas corpus petition was filed Monday in New York, where she is being held at the Bedford Hills Women’s Correctional Facility, and in New Hampshire, where the murder took place.

“Ms. Smart’s trial took place in an environment that no court had faced before: unrestricted media coverage that blurred the line between allegations and evidence,” Jason Ott, who is part of Smart’s legal team, said in a statement. “This petition calls into question whether a fair adversarial process took place. »

The move comes about seven months after New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte denied a request for a sentence reduction hearing. Ayotte said she reviewed the case and decided it did not deserve to be heard.

A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for New Hampshire’s attorney general said he would not comment on the ongoing litigation “other than to note that the state maintains that Ms. Smart received a fair trial and that her convictions were lawfully obtained and upheld on appeal.”

In their motion, lawyers for Smart, 57, say prosecutors misled the jury by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of Ms. Smart’s surreptitiously recorded conversations, which included words that were not audible on the recordings. Among the words they said were not 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 going to be arrested” and the word murder in the sentence “that would have been the perfect murder”.

“Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: When people are given a script, they inevitably hear the words they are shown,” Smart’s lawyer, Matthew Zernhelt, said in a statement. “The jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently – they were being directed towards a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict. »

The attorneys also argued that the conviction should be overturned because the verdict was tainted by media attention and because of erroneous instructions given to the jury. They argued that jurors were told they must conclude that Smart acted with premeditation, not that they should consider only the evidence presented at trial.

They also argued that the trial court gave him a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for complicity to first-degree murder, although New Hampshire does not impose that sentence for that charge.

Smart was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later shot and killed her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry. The shooter was released in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Although Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of complicity to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life without parole.

It took until 2024 for Smart to take full responsibility for her husband’s death. In a video posted in June, she said she spent years deflecting blame “almost like it was a coping mechanism.”

Smart’s trial was a media circus and one of the first high-profile cases in the United States involving 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 did not kill her husband. Flynn and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors and have all since been released.

Flynn and Patrick Randall, 17, entered Smarts’ Derry condominium and forced Gregory Smart to kneel in the lobby. As Randall held a knife to the man’s throat, Flynn shot him in the head with a hollow point. Both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. They were paroled in 2015. Two other teenagers served prison sentences and were 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.