Pamela Smart tries to overturn a teenage murder conviction for her husband

BOSTON (AP) — Pamela Smart, who is serving life in prison after her teenage student was accused of plotting her husband’s murder in 1990, is seeking to overturn her conviction in what her lawyers claim are 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 occurred.

“Ms. Smart’s trial unfolded in an environment no court had ever encountered before — wall-to-wall media coverage that blurred the lines between allegations and evidence,” Jason Ott, a member of Smart’s legal team, said in a statement. “This petition challenges whether there was a fair adversarial process.”

The move comes seven months after New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte denied a request for a commutation hearing. Ayotte said she reviewed the case and determined it did not merit 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 it does not comment on pending cases “other than to note that the state received a fair trial for Ms. Smart and that her conviction was legally obtained and upheld on appeal.”

In their petition, lawyers for Smart, 57, argued that prosecutors had misled the jury by providing false transcripts of Ms. Smart’s secretly recorded conversations that included words that could not be heard on the recordings. Among the words they claimed were not spoken but in the transcript were the word killed in the sentence “You killed your husband,” the word exposed in the sentence “I will be exposed” and the word murdered in the sentence “It would have been a perfect murder.”

“Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: When people are handed a script, they inevitably hear the words they’re shown,” Smart’s attorney, Matthew Zernhelt, said in a statement. “The judges weren’t evaluating the recordings independently – they were being directed to a conclusion, and that direction made the decision.”

Lawyers also argued that the conviction should be overturned because the court’s verdict was tainted by media attention and flawed jury instructions. They argued that jurors must find that Smart acted with premeditation, not that they must consider only the evidence presented at trial.

They also argued that the trial court should have given him a mandatory life sentence without parole for being an accessory to first-degree murder, even though New Hampshire does not mandate 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 shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry. The shooter was released in 2015 after serving 25 years in prison. Although Smart denied knowledge of the conspiracy, she was convicted of first-degree murder and being an accessory to other crimes and sentenced to life without parole.

It took Smart until 2024 to accept full responsibility for her husband’s death. In a video released in June, she said she had spent years shedding guilt “almost like it was a coping mechanism.”

Smart’s trial was a media circus and one of America’s first high-profile cases involving a sexual relationship between a school employee and a student. The student, William Flynn, testified that Smart told him she needed to kill her husband because she was afraid she would lose everything if they divorced and threatened to break up with him if she didn’t kill him. Flynn and three other teenagers cooperated with prosecutors and have all 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 the 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 in prison. They were granted parole in 2015. Two other teenagers served prison terms and have since been released.

The case inspired the 1992 book “To Die For” by Joyce Maynard and the 1995 film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.