BOSTON — Boston (AFP) – Pamela SmartShe, who is serving a life sentence for orchestrating the 1990 murder of her husband by her teenage student, is seeking to have her conviction overturned over what her lawyers claim are several constitutional violations.
A petition for a habeas corpus was filed Monday in New York, where she is being held at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and in New Hampshire, where the murder occurred.
“Ms. Smart’s trial took place in an environment no court has faced before — extensive media coverage that blurred the line between the prosecution and the evidence,” Jason Ott, part of Smart’s legal team, said in a statement. “This petition challenges whether a fair adversary process was conducted.”
This move comes after about seven months New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte Request for mitigation hearing denied. Ayotte said she reviewed the case and decided it was not worth 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 lawsuits “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 the 57-year-old Smart say prosecutors misled the jury by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations by Ms. Smart that included words that were not audible on the recordings. Among the words they claim were not audible but in the text were the word “killed” in the sentence “I killed your husband”, the word caught in the sentence “I’ll be caught” and the word murder in the sentence “This would have been a perfect murder”.
“Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: when people are handed a text, they inevitably hear the words shown to them,” Matthew Zirnhilt, Smart’s attorney, said in a statement. “Jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently, but rather were oriented toward the conclusion, and that direction determined the verdict.”
The attorneys also argued that the conviction should be overturned because the verdict was tainted by media attention and by faulty jury instructions. They said jurors were told they had to find that Smart acted with premeditation, and were not told they had to consider only the evidence presented at trial.
They also argued that the court sentenced her to mandatory life in prison without parole for being an accessory to first-degree murder, even though New Hampshire did not impose that sentence for the charge.
Smart was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy whose husband, Gregory Smart, was shot to death in Derry. The shooter was released in 2015 after serving a 25-year prison sentence. Although Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of complicity to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison 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 had spent years deflecting blame “as if it was a coping mechanism.”
Smart’s trial was a media circus and one of the first high-profile cases in America about a sexual relationship between a school employee and a student. Student William Flynn testified that Smart told him she needed to kill her husband 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 17-year-old Patrick Randall entered Smarts’ Derry condominium and forced Gregory Smart to his knees in the hallway. As Randall held a knife to the man’s throat, Flynn fired a hollow-point bullet into his head. They both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. They were granted parole 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.