After 34 years in prison and numerous failed attempts to be released, New Hampshire’s Pamela Smart finally accepted responsibility for her 1990 plot to have her husband murdered in their Derry home.
Smart, 56, is serving life in prison for conspiring with her teenage student lover and his friends to have her husband, Gregg Smart, killed.
In a video statement released to WMUR TV on Tuesday, Smart admitted she is also responsible. The video came as part of her latest sentence reduction request. She denied she had responsibility until now.
Smart earned the nickname "Ice Queen," during her trail when she showed little to no emotion during testimony.
While some people believe Smart should remain behind bars, a retired Massachusetts judge who has worked on sentencing reform said Smart is likely no longer dangerous and exhibited “pro-social” work while incarcerated.
“The truth is that the vast majority of offenders age out of antisocial behavior quite young. She likely aged out of promoting violent behavior decades ago,” said Judge Jack Lu, a retired Massachusetts Superior Court judge who teaches at numerous local colleges and universities.
Lu has created and taught law school sentencing courses. He chaired the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission when it overhauled state guidelines.
“While incarcerated she has done amazing things. She should get credit for that. To me, more importantly, it suggests that she is someone that has learned to act in a pro-social way, and is no longer a threat,” Lu said in an interview.
‘I desperately didn’t want to be responsible’
Smart was a 22-year-old media coordinator at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton, New Hampshire, when she began an affair with the 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot her husband.
The shooter, William “Billy” Flynn, was freed from prison in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence.
Though Pamela Smart consistently denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and other crimes, and sentenced to life without parole.
In her videotaped statement released Tuesday, she said she began to “dig deeper into my own responsibility” through her experience in a writing group that “encouraged us to go beyond and to spaces that we didn’t want to be in.”
“For me, that was really hard, because going into those places, in those spaces is where I found myself responsible for something I desperately didn’t want to be responsible for: my husband’s murder,” she says in the video.
“I had to acknowledge for the first time in my own mind and my own heart how responsible I was, because I had deflected blame all the time, I think, almost as if it was a coping mechanism, because the truth of being so responsible was very difficult for me.”
The trial, held at Rockingham Superior Court in Exeter, New Hampshire, was a media circus and one of America’s first high-profile cases about a sexual affair between a school staff member and a student.
Author 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.
Flynn and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors. They have all since been released.
Request for ‘honest conversation’
In her video statement, Smart asked to have an “honest conversation” with New Hampshire’s five-member Executive Council, which approves state contracts and appointees to the courts and state agencies, and with Gov. Chris Sununu. Smart has exhausted all of her judicial appeals and has to go through the council for a sentence change.
The council rejected her latest request, her third, in 2022 and Smart appealed to the state Supreme Court, which dismissed her petition last year.
Val Fryatt, a cousin of Gregory Smart, said Tuesday that Smart “danced around it” and accepted full responsibility “without admitting the facts around what made her ‘fully responsible.’”
Sununu said Tuesday, “Pamela Smart will be given the same opportunity to petition the Council for a hearing as any other individual.”
“New Hampshire’s process for commutation or pardon requests is fair and thorough,” Sununu said.
Joseph Kenney, of the governor’s council, said he would look into the matter, but “it’s not on my radar screen as of yet.”
Former judge: Sentence ‘about vengeance’
Lu noted Smart has served 34 years of a sentence of life without parole.
“The U.S. is one of the top incarceration rate countries in the world and sentences like this are part of the reason,” said Lu.
He said at 34 years of incarceration, “this sentence is about vengeance.”
“Lots of folks that have spent their lives studying this believe such a sentence should be reserved for the worst of the worst — for example, cop-killers and terrorists. She doesn’t qualify as horrific as the crime was. Modern brain science is teaching us just now that the brain in young adults is rewiring itself up to age 24 or beyond. Pam Smart was younger than this when she did this. She was not as morally responsible as a true adult,” Lu said.
“There is no science behind the ‘eye for an eye’ nature of this sentence. This sentence is an expression of the nature of American sentencing making us one of the highest incarceration nations much different than the countries that we might consider ourselves similar to,” he added.
Smart is serving time at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York. She has earned a doctorate in ministry and three master’s degrees behind bars. She has also tutored fellow inmates, been ordained as a minister, and been part of an inmate liaison committee. She said she is remorseful and has been rehabilitated.
“I made excuses, dismissed my own involvement, and blamed everyone else but myself,” Smart wrote in her letter to Sununu.
Because she wasn’t there the night of the murder and didn’t pull the trigger, she thought she wasn’t responsible, saying she “became comfortable in my warped logic.”
She added, “I am the one to blame for his absence from this world.”
Smart’s longtime lawyer, Mark Sisti, said the petition was filed last week.
“We’re trying to impress upon the governor and council that we believe this is the time for them to actually listen to her,” he said. “If they have any questions, she’s more than happy to answer any of the questions that they may have.”
Nearly 30 letters of support, many from people in the corrections system, were included in her petition.
“She is the true definition of a rehabilitated, improved and refined human being,” Edward Gibbs, a member of the York State Assembly, wrote in his letter dated March 14.
Staff reporter Angelina Berube contributed to this story.
Material from The Associated Press was used in this story.
Follow staff reporter Jill Harmacinski on Twitter @EagleTribJill.
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