The New Hampshire Supreme Court last week rejected the latest go at getting a sentence reduction for Pamela Smart, a former high school media coordinator convicted of conspiring with her 16-year-old lover to murder her husband in 1990.
Smart, now 55, was convicted and sentenced to life without parole after the teenage student shot and killed Gregory Smart, her husband.
Smart, who has exhausted all judicial appeals, sought a sentence reduction from an elected state council last year, the third time she has done so, as CrimeOnline previously reported. The panel unanimous rejected her request, and she appealed to the supreme court.
“This ruling by the New Hampshire Supreme Court is a continuing disappointment that devastates our hopes for Pamela Smart finally receiving reasonable and fair process in the State of New Hampshire,” Smart’s spokeswoman, Eleanor Pam, told CBS News in an email.
All four of the teens who carried out the killing, staged to look like a botched robbery, cooperated with prosecutors and received shorter sentences. They have all been released from prison, included Smart’s lover, William Flynn — who shot Gregory Smart in the head, and Pete Randall, who held a knife to Smart’s throat while Flynn shot him. They were released in around 2015, and the other two men involved, while they were teenagers, were released years before.
Pam said that Smart — 22 when she began her affair with the student — is “full rehabilitated and is no danger to society.” She has earned two master’s degrees behind bars and tutors inmates, is an ordained minister, and is part of an inmate liaison committee.
The state attorney general’s office, however, says she has never accepted full responsibility for the murder.
The court did not make its decision on the merits of Smart’s appeal. Instead, it said that it could not interfere in a “political” decision.
Smart’s trial was one of the earliest concerning an affair between a school staff member and a student.
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[Featured image: Pamela Smart/Derry Police Department]
