Pamela Smart, serving life for plotting husband's murder, seeks new trial

By — Kathy McCormack, Associated Press Kathy McCormack, Associated Press By — Holly Ramer, Associated Press Holly Ramer, Associated Press Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/pamela-smart-serving-life-for-plotting-husbands-murder-seeks-new-trial Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Pamela Smart, serving life for plotting husband's murder, seeks new trial Nation Jul 20, 2026 1:17 PM EDT CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Lawyers for Pamela Smart, who is serving life in prison for orchestrating the murder of her husband by her teenage student in 1990, urged a New Hampshire judge Monday to allow her latest petition for a new trial to move forward. Smart, 58, was a 22-year-old high school media coordinator when she began an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later fatally shot her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry. The shooter was freed in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence. Though Smart denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and other crimes and was sentenced to life without parole after a trial that was one of the first in the nation to be broadcast live on television from start to finish. Smart filed a petition for habeas corpus relief in January seeking to overturn her conviction over what her lawyers claim were several constitutional violations. The state responded with a motion to dismiss the petition, resulting in Monday's hearing, which Smart attended remotely from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York. Merrimack County Superior Court Judge James Kennedy took the matter under advisement. He planned to rule in 30 to 60 days. Smart's lawyers say transcripts of recordings during trial were inaccurate Smart's lawyers argue that prosecutors misled the jury by providing them with inaccurate transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations of Smart that included words that were not audible on the recordings. Among the words they claim weren't audible but in the transcript were the word "killed" in the sentence "you had your husband killed," the word "busted" in the sentence "I'm gonna be busted" and the word "murder" in the sentence "this would have been the perfect murder." "Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: when people are handed a script, they inevitably hear the words they are shown," Smart's attorney, Matthew Zernhelt, said in a statement earlier this year. "Jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently — they were being directed toward a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict." In court Monday, he described a forensic study that showed providing transcripts alongside muffled audio leads listeners to believe the written text even when inaccurate. "Adding a transcript of language to the jurors changed their interpretation of what they believed they were hearing, how confident they were in what they believed they were hearing and how clear it was t