Too little, too late
Last week, the New Hampshire Executive Council unanimously rejected a request for a sentence reduction hearing by Pamela Smart, a former high school employee convicted of recruiting her teenage lover to kill her husband.
Smart was 22 and working as a high school media coordinator when she began an affair with the 15-year-old student who shot and killed her husband, Gregory Smart, in 1990. Although she denied knowledge of the plot, she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes and sentenced to life without parole. The student, William Flynn, and three other teens cooperated with prosecutors, served shorter sentences and have been released.
Smart’s request was rejected in a 5-0 vote. It’s the third time Smart has asked the council for a hearing. Now 54, she has exhausted all of her judicial appeal options.
Eleanor Pam, a spokesperson for Smart, called the council’s decision “disappointing” and said the evidence presented on Smart’s behalf was “overwhelming, and any fair reading of it by fair-minded persons should have resulted in a hearing.”
This time, though, Smart apologized to her husband’s family, something he has not done in previous attempts to get a hearing.
“I offer no excuses for my actions and behavior,” she said in a recorded statement that was sent as a DVD to the attorney general’s office in December. “I’m to blame.”
“I regret that it took me so long to apologize to the Smart family, my own family, and everyone else. But I think that I wasn’t at a place where I was willing to own that or face that,” she said. “I was young and selfish and I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what I was doing.”
A cousin of Gregory Smart said she is not sure what Pamela Smart is apologizing for.
“In her petition, she apologizes to those ‘impacted by (her) actions and misjudgment’ and admits that it took her decades to accept this responsibility,” Val Fryatt said. “She needs to define what those actions and misjudgment truly represent. When she is ready to apologize and truly admit to the crimes she committed, our ears are wide open.”