Pamela Smart, serving life for plotting husband's murder, seeks new trial

Lawyers for Pamela Smart, who is serving a life sentence for plotting her husband's murder in 1990, are urging a New Hampshire judge to grant her latest bid for a new trial. Smart, now 58, was convicted as an accomplice to first-degree murder after her then-teenage student killed her husband, Gregory Smart. The shooter was released in 2015.

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Modern science confirms what common sense has always told us: when people are handed a script, they inevitably hear the words they are shown.

Smart's legal team filed a petition for habeas corpus relief in January, asserting that her conviction was marred by constitutional violations. The state moved to dismiss the petition, leading to a hearing where Smart appeared remotely from a New York correctional facility. Merrimack County Superior Court Judge James Kennedy has taken the matter under advisement and is expected to issue a ruling within 30 to 60 days.

A central argument from Smart's lawyers centers on alleged inaccuracies in trial transcripts. They contend that prosecutors presented jurors with transcripts of recorded conversations that contained words not audibly present in the recordings, such as "killed" in the phrase "you had your husband killed." Attorney Matthew Zernhelt argued that providing these transcripts alongside muffled audio led jurors to accept the written text as fact, thereby directing their verdict.

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Jurors were not evaluating the recordings independently, they were being directed toward a conclusion, and that direction decided the verdict.

During Monday's hearing, Zernhelt presented a forensic study suggesting that the presence of transcripts, even with unclear audio, biases listeners toward believing the written words. He argued that "there's no absolute truth about what's on the tapes," but the transcripts created an expectation that influenced jurors' interpretations. Smart's lawyers also cited media attention and faulty jury instructions as factors that tainted the verdict.

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There's no absolute truth about what's on the tapes. Nothing decipherable is on the tapes. But when you tell someone what they're hearing, you set this expectation ... and they will hear it.