A judge rejects Pamela Smart’s latest bid for a new trial in 1990
accomplice to murder case
[September 18, 2026]
By HOLLY RAMER
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire judge on Thursday dismissed the
latest petition for a new trial from Pamela Smart, who is serving life
in prison for orchestrating the murder of her husband by her teenage
student more than three decades ago.
Smart, 59, was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she
began an affair with the 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot her
husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry in 1990.
The shooter was freed in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Though
Smart denied knowledge of the plot at the time, she was convicted in
1991 of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and other crimes and
was sentenced to life without parole. Her trial was one of the first in
the nation to be broadcast live on television from start to finish.
She didn't take responsibility for her husband’s death until 2024,
saying she spent years deflecting blame “almost as if it was a coping
mechanism.”
Smart filed a petition for habeas corpus relief in January seeking to
overturn her conviction over what her lawyers claimed were several
constitutional violations. After holding a hearing in July, Merrimack
County Superior Court Judge James Kennedy on Thursday granted the
state's motion to dismiss the petition, saying her arguments already
were or could have been raised during earlier appeals, and even if they
hadn't, lacked merit.
Among other things, Smart’s lawyers argued that prosecutors misled the
jury by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of surreptitiously
recorded conversations between Smart and her student intern that
included words that were not audible on the recordings.
Among the words they claimed weren’t audible but appeared in the
transcript was 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.”
[to top of second column]
|
The fight over congressional maps put nearly 35 million people into
new House districts
In the petition, Smart's lawyers described a forensic study
suggesting that providing transcripts to juries along with muffled
audio can lead listeners to believe the written text, even when it's
inaccurate.
But Kennedy said the study's legal relevancy was “dubious" given
that it wasn't published or available to read in full and that even
the description given by Smart's attorneys failed to identify any
inaccuracies. The judge also rejected Smart's arguments that the
verdict was tainted by media attention and by faulty jury
instructions.
Smart’s trial was a media circus and one of the first high-profile
cases in the U.S. 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
Flynn if he didn’t kill her husband.
Flynn and three other teens who participated in the plot cooperated
with prosecutors, and all have since 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.
All contents © copyright 2026 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
