CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Pamela Smart, a former high school employee convicted of recruiting her teenage lover to kill her husband, was denied a sentence reduction hearing Wednesday, more than 30 years after a sensational trial that inspired books & a Nicole Kidman movie.
Smart was 22 & working as a high school media coordinator when she began an affair with the 15-year-old student who shot & killed her husband, Gregory Smart, in 1990. Although she denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder & other crimes & sentenced to life without parole. The student, William Flynn, and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors, served shorter sentences & have been released.
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.
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 & 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 & 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 & selfish & I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what I was doing.”
In the state’s response, Jeffery Strelzin, associate attorney general, wrote that Smart has told a false narrative for over 30 years & just because she’s decided to change that now “does not mean that she has truly changed & fully acknowledged all the crimes she committed as an accomplice & conspirator in her husband’s murder & the perpetrator of witness tampering.”
“Decades of lies cannot be undone in an instant by newfound claims of remorse & a vague acceptance of responsibility,” Strelzin, who opposed a sentence reduction, added.
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