New Hampshire Judge Dismisses Pamela Smart's Bid for New Trial in 1990 Murder Case
A New Hampshire judge has thrown out Pamela Smart's latest petition for a new trial, more than three decades after her conviction for orchestrating her husband's murder.
New Hampshire Court Rejects Pamela Smart's Latest Appeal in Husband's 1990 Murder
A Merrimack County Superior Court judge on Thursday dismissed Pamela Smart's most recent petition for a new trial, kbtx.com reports, keeping the 59-year-old behind bars where she has remained since her 1991 conviction for accomplice to first-degree murder.
Smart was 22 years old and working as a high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old student, William Flynn, who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry, New Hampshire, in 1990. Flynn was released in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Three other teenagers who participated in the plot also cooperated with prosecutors and have since been freed.
Smart was sentenced to life without parole. She did not publicly accept responsibility for her husband's death until 2024, saying she had spent years deflecting blame "almost as if it was a coping mechanism."
Habeas corpus petition rejected on multiple grounds
In January, Smart's lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition seeking to overturn her conviction, citing several alleged constitutional violations. Judge James Kennedy held a hearing in July before granting the state's motion to dismiss on Thursday. Kennedy ruled that Smart's arguments either had already been raised in earlier appeals or could have been, and that even if they had not, they lacked merit.
Central to the petition was a claim that prosecutors provided the jury with inaccurate transcripts of secretly recorded conversations between Smart and a student intern. Her lawyers argued that key words — including "killed" in the phrase "you had your husband killed," "busted" in "I'm gonna be busted," and "murder" in "this would have been the perfect murder" — were not actually audible on the recordings but appeared in the written transcripts given to jurors.
Smart's legal team cited a forensic study suggesting that pairing muffled audio recordings with written transcripts can cause listeners to accept the written text as accurate, even when it is not. Kennedy dismissed the study's legal relevance as "dubious," noting it had not been published in full and that even the description provided by Smart's attorneys failed to identify specific inaccuracies. The judge also rejected her claims that the verdict was compromised by excessive media coverage and by flawed jury instructions.
A case that shaped media and popular culture
Smart's 1991 trial was among the first in the United States to be broadcast live on television from start to finish, drawing intense national attention. The case became a landmark in discussions about televised court proceedings and sexual relationships between school employees and students.
Flynn testified at trial that Smart told him she needed her husband dead because she feared losing everything in a divorce, and that she threatened to end their relationship if he refused to carry out the killing.
The case subsequently inspired Joyce Maynard's 1992 novel To Die For and the 1995 film adaptation of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.
Source: Google News MT — Crime (en)