MERRIMACK, N.H. (Court TV) — A New Hampshire judge has blocked killer Pamela Smart’s latest attempt to get a new trial, granting a motion from prosecutors to dismiss her petition.
FILE – Pamela Smart is seen in a 2010 image taken from video, courtesy of WMUR. (WMUR Television via AP, File)
Pamela Smart, 58, is currently behind bars in New York, serving a life sentence without parole after a jury convicted her of witness tampering, conspiracy to commit murder and accomplice to first-degree murder in the death of her husband, Gregory Smart. Pamela Smart’s teenage lover, 15-year-old William Flynn, shot Gregory Smart to death in the married couple’s home on May 1, 1990.
At the time of the shooting, Pamela Smart worked as the director of media services for the school district where Flynn was a student; she was 22 when the affair began. At her trial, prosecutors said that Flynn shot the victim with the help of three friends at Pamela Smart’s direction; the defendant led the teens to the house and suggested they stage the scene to look like a burglary.
After the teens were arrested, Pamela Smart confided in another teenager, who went to the police and participated in a recorded phone call with the defendant that was used at her trial. In her latest bid for a new trial, Pamela Smart claimed that the transcript prosecutors gave the jury to read while listening to the recordings was inaccurate and led the jury to the wrong verdict.
Merrimack County Superior Court Judge James Kennedy said in his order dismissing Pamela Smart’s petition that the New Hampshire Supreme Court had already addressed the issue of the transcripts’ accuracy and found that the defendant’s petition “failed to make any particularized showing of inaccuracies in the transcripts relative to the recordings or how she may have been prejudiced thereby.”
Pamela Smart said in her petition that her trial attorney had been ineffective because he conceded her guilt on the witness tampering charge to the jury against her will. But Kennedy said that wasn’t actually what happened—explaining in his ruling that the crime of witness tampering requires both proof of the act and proof that the accused knows that the behavior is wrong. At her trial, Pamela Smart’s attorney told the jury that the defendant was “clearly engaging in acts that constitute witness tampering” but never said that she was guilty. In fact, Kennedy noted, minutes later, Pamela Smart’s attorney told the jury, “I’m telling you the acts are there, and that you shouldn’t find her guilty because of the factors and what was going on in her mind. She snapped.”
Pamela Smart was convicted in New Hampshire but is serving her sentence at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York under a pact between the two states. The defendant previously filed the same motion in New York state, but the court there determined it lacked jurisdiction over the case.
