Pamela Smart seeks to overturn conviction for having teenager murder her
husband
[January 07, 2026]
By MICHAEL CASEY
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 over what her lawyers claim 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 happened.
“Ms. Smart’s trial unfolded in an environment that no court had
previously confronted — 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 process took place.”
The move comes about seven months after New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte
rejected a request for a sentence reduction hearing. Ayotte said she
reviewed the case and decided it was not deserving of a hearing.
A spokesman for the New York State Department of Corrections and
Community Supervision said it would have no comment about the petition.
A spokeman for New Hampshire’s attorney general said it would not
comment on pending litigation “other than to note that the State
maintains Ms. Smart received a fair trial and that her convictions were
lawfully 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 surreptitiously recorded conversations of Ms. 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. “Jurors
were not evaluating the recordings independently — they were being
directed toward a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict.”
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Pamela Smart answers questions from the defense in her murder
conspiracy trial, March 18, 1991, in Rockingham County Superior
Court in Exeter, N.H. (AP Photo/Jon Pierre Lasseigne, File)
Lawyers also argued the conviction should be overturned because 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, 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.
Smart 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. 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 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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