Pamela Smart requests court reconsider her conviction 35 years later
Pamela Smart, who is serving life in prison for plotting to kill her husband with her teenage student and lover in 1990, filed a new request for a hearing Tuesday.
Now 58 years old, Smart was in her early twenties when she was convicted for being an accomplice to the murder of her husband Gregory Smart, which was carried out by several teenagers including a 15 year-old boy Smart was having an affair with. At the time, Smart was a high school media coordinator.
The others convicted in the murder have all been released from prison.
Smart’s attorneys argued that her trial was unfair and unconstitutional in a 169-page petition for writ of habeas corpus. The document was sent to the Department of Justice in New Hampshire, where the murder was committed, and the New York Department of Correction, where she is currently locked up.
Her lawyers argued that the media frenzy over the case, the prosecution’s use of a transcript for a grainy audio tape, and other factors all played into making the trial unconstitutional.
“Pamela Smart’s case was subjected to a type of media scrutiny that the world had never seen. News stations sensationalized any purported detail of the case that they could get their hands on. Allegations ran wild,” her lawyers wrote. “It was a trial by the media in the purest form.”
The filing claimed that Smart was convicted on “an inflammatory news media story and not the judicially reviewed evidence produced during trial, as has been admitted by a juror.”
It also pointed to research that they say shows the prosecution unfairly biased the jury against their client. The 191-participant study the filing cited found that a person would hear something different than from the transcript of the audio tapes used in Smart’s trial if they were given a different transcript or didn’t receive a transcript at all.
“The state’s transcripts imposed an insurmountable cognitive bias,” Smart’s attorneys wrote.
They also noted that New Hampshire failed to give Smart due process when it imposed a mandatory life sentence.
“The State chose to charge Ms. Smart with accomplice to first-degree murder and with the substantive crime of first-degree murder,” her attorneys wrote. “These two counts are statutorily distinct.”
The petition asked the court to grant Smart a reverse all findings of guilt and grant Smart a trial or schedule a new sentencing hearing.
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Last spring, New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte denied a pardon request from Smart, writing in a statement, “People who commit violent crimes must be held accountable to the law. I take very seriously the action of granting a pardon hearing and believe this process should only be used in exceptional circumstances.”
