BOSTON (AP) — Pamela Smart, who is serving life in prison for orchestrating the murder of her husband by her teenage student in 1990, is seeking to overturn her conviction on what her lawyers say were several constitutional violations.
The petition for habeas corpus relief was filed Monday in New York, where she is being held at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and, in New Hampshire, where the murder took place.
“Ms. Smart’s trial took place in an environment that no court had faced before – wall-to-wall media coverage that blurred the line between allegation and evidence,” Jason Ott, who is part of Smart’s legal team, said in a statement. “This petition challenges whether a fair adversarial trial was conducted.”
The move comes about seven months after New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte denied a request for a commutation hearing. Ayotte said she reviewed the case and decided it did not deserve a hearing.
A spokesman 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 said he would not comment on pending litigation “other than to note that the State maintains that Ms. Smart received a fair trial and that her convictions were legally obtained and upheld on appeal.”
In their petition, lawyers for the 57-year-old Smart argue that prosecutors misled the jury by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of Ms. Smart’s secretly recorded conversations that included words that could not be heard on the recordings. Among the words that they claim were not heard but in the transcription there was the word killed in the sentence “did you know your husband was killed,” the open word in the sentence “I will stay” 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 given a script, they inevitably hear the words that are shown,” said Smart’s lawyer, Matthew Zernhelt, in a statement. “The jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently – they were being directed to a conclusion, and that direction determined the verdict.”
The lawyers also argued that the conviction should be overturned because the verdict was tainted by media attention and because of faulty instructions to the jury. They claimed that the jurors were told that they must find that Smart acted with premeditation, and were not told that they must consider only the evidence presented at trial.
They also argued that the trial court gave her a mandatory sentence of life without parole for being an accomplice to first degree murder, even though New Hampshire did not give that sentence for the charge.
Smart was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began a relationship with a 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot 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 being an accomplice 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 released in June, she said she spent years deflecting blame “almost like it was a coping mechanism.”
Smart’s trial was a media frenzy and one of the first high-profile cases in America involving a sexual relationship between a school employee and a student. The student, William Flynn, testified that Smart told him that she needed her husband to be killed because she was afraid that 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 teenagers cooperated with prosecutors and 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 point-blank 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 terms 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.