Pamela Smart, the New Hampshire woman serving a life sentence for her role in a plot to kill her husband in 1990, has admitted full responsibility for the first time in a video statement released Tuesday.
The 56-year-old was convicted of being an accomplice in the murder of her husband, Gregory Smart, in Derry, N.H.
Her high-profile trial, which made front-page headlines in early 1991, was the inspiration for the bestselling novel “To Die For” and a 1995 film starring Nicole Kidman.
Smart worked as a high school media coordinator when she began an affair with 15-year-old Billy Flynn. According to prosecutors, she threatened to break up with him if he didn’t kill her husband.
Flynn did, but Smart denied knowledge of the plot. She was eventually convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder and other crimes and sentenced to life without parole.
While Smart has served her sentence in New York’s Bedford Hills prison for the past three decades, only the governor of New Hampshire and the state’s five-member executive council have the power to commute it.
In the newly released video statement, Smart requested to have a meeting with the executive council, where she hopes to have an “honest conversation” to express her remorse and discuss her “acceptance of responsibility” and transformation over the past 33 years.
Her public acknowledgment of guilt came after she joined a writing group, which led her to “dig deeper into [her] own responsibility,” Smart explains 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,” she said.
Over the past three decades, Smart has “matured beyond her years and has grown to realize her part in the murder of her husband,” her attorney, Mark Sisti, wrote in a petition for commutation addressed to the state’s attorney general, governor, and executive council.
“She takes full responsibility for her actions,” Sisti added.
This is the fourth time Smart has sought a commutation. In her last clemency petition, in March 2022, she was denied the right to present her case.
Flynn was released on parole in 2015 after serving a 25-year sentence.
With News Wire Services
