By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
Decades after she was convicted of manipulating her teenage boyfriend into murdering her husband, Pam Smart’s latest attempt to get out of prison failed.
Merrimack Superior Court James Kennedy rejected every aspect of Smart’s Habeas Corpus petition which sought to have her charges overturned. Kennedy’s 55-page decision, released Thursday, represents yet another court upholding the 1991 guilty verdicts that sent her to prison for life.
Kennedy’s ruling grants the state’s motion to dismiss Smart’s Habeas petition, finding that Smart and her legal team failed on all counts to present a convincing case. The Habeas petition largely relied on legal arguments already rejected by prior courts in her several prior appeals, Kennedy wrote.
Smart’s one new legal argument, that a scientific study done on her behalf found that faulty transcripts of a damning recorded conversation created a bias in the minds of jurors. But here, Kennedy found no actual evidence to support the claim the Davidson Study provided any compelling evidence.
“The legal relevance of the Davidson Study to the present motion, even taken in context with the earlier studies to which the Petitioner refers, is dubious,” Kennedy wrote.
Smart’s lawyers never made the full Davidson Study available to the court, but claimed jurors relied on the error-filled transcripts when deliberating. The trial record shows jurors had both transcripts and access to the actual audio, and were instructed to rely on the audio when coming to a verdict.
After 16-year-old Billy Flynn murdered Gregg Smart in the scheme cooked up by Pam Smart, Smart’s conversations with witness Cecelia Pierce were recorded by police and played for jurors during the trial.
Flynn and Peirce were students at Winnacunnet High School, where Smart taught a television media class. Smart started a sexual relationship with Flynn in 1990, and convinced him to murder her husband and make it look like a burglary gone bad.
During the recorded conversation with Peirce, Smart acknowledged she planned the murder Flynn and his friend, Pete Randall, committed. Smart told Peirce that if she was arrested by police she planned to admit to the affair with Flynn, but deny her role in planning the murder. Smart told Peirce she would be believed, and Flynn would take the blame.
“[Smart] told Peirce she was confident that, as between a sixteen-year-old ‘in the slammer facing the rest of his life’ and herself, ‘with a professional reputation and a course that I teach,’ her denial would be believed,” the New Hampshire Supreme Court wrote in a prior summary prior the facts.
Flynn, Randall and student Vance Lattime all pleaded guilty to their roles in the murder and testified against Smart during her trial. All three men have publicly taken responsibility for their crimes and have since been released from prison.
Smart’s Habeas petition claimed that the negative media attention surrounding the case also tainted the jury, but again, Kennedy found her argument wanting.
Smart’s arrest and trial became media sensations, with worldwide news outlets covering the case. Smart and Flynn’s crime also served as inspiration for the novel and movie “To Die For.”
Smart already tried to argue that the media coverage influenced the jury, but now she claims to have proof. Juror Charlotte Jefts gave a 2005 interview to the now defunct Justice Magazine in which Jefts discussed Smart’s guilt. The Jefts interview was never published, and Jefts herself is now deceased.
Kennedy wrote that the interview notes show that Jefts never directly said she had read or watched news stories about Smart before the trial. Even if Jefts had watched or read the Smart news, it would not have proved that she was biased against Smart. In fact, the records show that Jefts voted undecided three times during deliberations before finally voting guilty.
In the end, Smart was convicted when jurors like Jefts started to believe what she was capable of doing.
“[S]he didn’t think anything of murdering anyone who gets in her way,” Jefts told Justice Magazine.