CONCORD – Pam Smart, now 57, was turned down yet again for the chance to share what she has accomplished in her prison rehabilitation after serving three and a half decades of a life sentence for being an accomplice to the 1990 murder of her husband Gregg Smart in Derry.

“People who commit violent crimes must be held accountable to the law. I take very seriously the action of granting a pardon hearing and believe this process should only be used in exceptional circumstances. Having reviewed this case, I have decided it is not deserving of a hearing before the Executive Council,” Ayotte said in a news release Thursday.

Ayotte didn’t say what in the request showed it wasn’t deserving.

Smart’s attorney Mark Sisti said Ayotte couldn’t have reviewed her case or she would have known that Smart isn’t seeking a pardon hearing, but rather a commutation of her sentence before the Executive Council.

“First of all, she didn’t read the petition for commutation,” but was reacting politically in denying the hearing, Sisti said.

“Her own Attorney General’s Office hasn’t replied to that document. They didn’t have the wherewithal,  ability or time to do the research and express an objective opinion to reply to the petition,” Sisti said.

Smart was then the media coordinator when she had an affair with 15-year-old Billy Flynn, a student at Winnacunnet High School when she was 22.

Flynn, who carried out the murder was released on parole in 2015 after 25 years in prison. He testified against Smart during her trial. The other two teens who helped Flynn murder Gregg Smart have also been released.

Sisti said he is still a little perturbed that to this day, Smart hasn’t even gotten a hearing to be able to share with the governor, council and the public what she has done with her life in prison, which includes three master’s degrees and a doctorate.

Sisti said the three then-teenagers who “executed Gregg Smart must be as bewildered as I am by this denial.”

Ayotte “is making herself out as a law and order” governor, but insisted she is really politically motivated.

“The only rabbit (out of a hat) there is for Pam Smart is for some governor to have the guts to actually have a hearing,” Sisti said.

In a brief video shot last year from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York where Smart is serving her sentence without the chance for parole, she asked the five-member Executive Council for “an honest conversation with you about my incarceration, my acceptance of responsibility and any concerns you might have, any questions…” either by video link or in person.

A link to her video is here https://vimeo.com/948765278/9ec230ccd5 

In a section of the video entitled “accepting responsibility” she said through her experience in “Eve’s group” at the correctional facility, she was encouraged to go in to “spaces we did not want to” she became aware of her role in Gregg Smart’s death, at their condo in Derry but she did not elaborate.

She said she was immature and is now “less impulsive” and now recognizes her “many mistakes.”

Prosecutors who have objected to her requests, which can be made every two years, said then she has not shown remorse or a willingness to fully accept the responsibility for getting teenage boys to carry out the murder. 

Reporter Paula Tracy contributed to this report