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Pamela Smart has been denied a sentence reduction on Wednesday, more than 30 years after her sensational trial that inspired books and the Nicole Kidman movie “To Die For.”
In 1990, Smart was 22 and working as a high school media coordinator when she was accused and eventually convicted of recruiting her teenage lover to kill her husband, Gregory Smart.
On May 1, 1990, William Flynn along with three of his high school friends planned and executed the murder of Gregory Smart, who was killed by a shot to the head. Later, the students and the other teens cooperated with prosecutors and served shorter sentences. Since then, the high schoolers have been released.
Although she denied knowledge of the plot, Smart was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes and sentenced to life without parole.
Smart’s request was rejected in a 5-0 vote by a New Hampshire state council. It’s the third time Smart has asked a council for a hearing. Now 54, she has exhausted all of her judicial appeal options.
“I am absolutely convinced that there’s no evidence or argument” to grant a commutation request, councilor Janet Stevens said during a short discussion.
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One thing that was different in this petition is that Smart apologized to her husband’s family for the first time.
“I offer no excuses for my actions and behavior,” she said in a recorded statement that was sent as a DVD to the attorney general’s office in December. “I’m to blame.”
“I regret that it took me so long to apologize to the Smart family, my own family, and everyone else. But I think that I wasn’t at a place where I was willing to own that or face that,” she said. “I was young and selfish and I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what I was doing.”
In this 1991 file photo Pamela Smart, testifies in Rockingham County Superior Court in Exeter, N.H.
(The Associated Press)
In the state’s response, Jeffery Strelzin, associate attorney general, wrote that Smart has told a false narrative for over 30 years and just because she’s decided to change that now “does not mean that she has truly changed and fully acknowledged all the crimes she committed as an accomplice and conspirator in her husband’s murder, and the perpetrator of witness tampering.”
“Decades of lies cannot be undone in an instant by newfound claims of remorse and a vague acceptance of responsibility,” Strelzin, who opposed a sentence reduction, added.
The trial was a media frenzy and one of the first high-profile cases about a sexual affair between a school staff member and a student. According to New Hampshire’s Attorney General’s office, they found 319 articles published from Smart’s arrest to February 1991.
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Joyce Maynard wrote “To Die For” in 1992, drawing from the Smart case. That inspired a 1995 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.
In this March 9, 1991, file photo, Patrick Randall, 17, testifies in Rockingham County Superior Court in Exeter, N.H.
(The Associated Press)
Flynn testified that Smart told him she needed her husband killed because she feared she would lose everything if they divorced. He said she threatened to break up with him if he didn’t kill Gregory Smart.
In addition to earning two master’s degrees in a Bedford Hills, New York, prison, Smart has tutored fellow inmates, has been ordained as a minister, and is part of an inmate liaison committee. Many letters of support from inmates, supervisors and others were included in her application.
Besides saying that she is remorseful and has been rehabilitated, Smart’s appeal noted pardons granted to three other women in New Hampshire in murder cases. But the state countered that the cases involved less serious second-degree murder charges and the other women did not entice a juvenile to commit murder.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
