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.